World through Coloured Glasses

Technology Phobia in Football: Is it Human Tendency to Avoid Technology

2010-06-28T06:28:00.003+05:30

As in the past refereeing decisions have marred key matches in the ongoing 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

FIFA says it will not embrace technology until it is proven to be extremely efficient and 100% reliable. Now obviously human referees (without help of technology) have proven to be much less efficient and reliable than this high standard being set for technology.

To Err is Human

Football has always seen a lot of refereeing errors: Handballs result in goals, offside goals are given, and balls crossing the line aren't given. These errors change the outcome. Such controversy can easily be avoided by using technology.

Technology in Other Sports

Other games have embraced technology. In cricket the third umpire has access to action replays based on which controversial catches, run-outs, stumpings and boundaries are decided. In tennis Hawkeye is used to make line calls. Ice hockey and field hockey also use action replays to decide controversial goals. Several other sports like basketball and American football have embraced technology to reduce error.

Fear of Technology

Just as in football, do we try to avoid technology as far as possible? Is there an inherent fear of technology?

We expect 100% reliability from technology but for the same task we are fine if a human performs far less reliably? We are willing to live with a poor system that is totally under our control than adopt a better system that involves the use of technology.

This seems to stem from the human desire to be on top of things. We like to be in control. Technology is used as a last resort. Technology is only brought in when the perceived threat to human superiority is totally removed.

This fear of technology is often misplaced. In the case of football it is clear that technology will improve decision making. The idea that technology will reduce the authority of the human referee is misplaced. If anything it will result in players having more confidence in the referee.

How the Internet Affects Our Lives: An Urban American's Perspective

2010-05-25T20:59:00.010+05:30

As someone who spends a significant time of my day on the Internet—at least nine hours, five or six days a week — I often reflect on how this time affects my life in ways not quite obvious. These reflections also lead to more questions about the effects of technology in general on our traditional ways of thinking. While I do not have all the answers, there are certainly a few things I've noticed about these effects. Some are “good” and some are, perhaps, more sinister. Still, I cannot help being a staid proponent of technology in all of its manifestations, especially as an urban American whose life veritably depends on connectivity. Here are a few basic pros, in which the Internet enriches our lives, and, of course, the cons, which hopefully will serve more as warnings than as wholesale criticism.

Pros

Widespread, easy access to information
This is the most obvious advantage of the Internet, but I firmly believe that it cannot be emphasized enough. Access to information has leveled the playing field for so many throughout the world, especially since a solid Internet connection is getting cheaper and cheaper to access. The biggest disease throughout the world is ignorance. The Internet actively combats it.

Efficiency
Another pro of the Internet that has influenced our lives on a global scale is specifically in the running of business, governments, and other organizations. While this effect isn't necessarily manifested on a personal level, we can see very clearly how all businesses and governments are “going mobile.” And this does have an effect on how we operate, since everyone works, or at least aspires to.

Cons

Information overload
One thing I've noticed while surfing the Internet is the mind-boggling speed at which information, from various sources, is delivered and processed through our minds. While quick, easy access is a blessing, the other side of the coin — information overload — is a very serious danger.

Decreased social skills
I've heard from many that people who spend much time on computers (i.e. software developers, computer scientists, etc.) lack social skills. While I don't think this is necessarily true because it's a generalization that seeks to marginalize a specific group of people, the Internet does present the danger of personal isolation. We, of course, already know this, but I don't think most are aware of how grave this danger is. Spending time on the Internet, especially when communicating with strangers, exacerbates loneliness, although it does seem to alleviate it at first. As a wired generation, we cannot forget the importance of in-person human relationships.

Death of the expert
The Internet is a vast compendium of millions of voices, all dying to be heard. While one could argue that the astronomically increased numbers in the blogosphere advocates a democracy, there exists a fine line between a democratic system and mob rule, so to speak. Now, academic credentials are no longer as relevant, since no one has to rest on laurels or other distinctions in order to be granted authority. To me, this is a very negative consequence of the Internet. However, we can avoid this trap by doing thorough research, which takes a lot of time, before believing anything that the online platform presents as fact.

This guest post is contributed by Mariana Ashley, who writes on the topics of online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: mariana.ashley031@gmail.com.

The Story of the Race for Finding Water on the Moon

2010-03-24T14:52:00.006+05:30

On November 14, 2008, at 20:06 hours IST, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) was separated from the Chandrayaan. It was Nehru’s one hundred and nineteen birth anniversary so it was fitting that the MIP carried the Indian flag with it. About 25 minutes later the MIP successfully impacted the moon’s surface at a predetermined site on the southern lunar pole.

MIP also carried CHACE (CHandra’s Altitudinal Composition Explorer) on board. CHACE was a sensitive instrument built to find elements present on the moon. Fifteen minutes before the MIP separation began CHACE was switched on. CHACE was built for these 25 minutes. As the MIP hurtled towards the moon surface CHACE was mapping the elements present on the moon. The scientists at ISRO were getting this data live. Within minutes, that night, they knew they had found water on the moon.

NASA Payloads - M3 and miniSAR

But MIP was not the only instrument on board the Chandrayaan that was looking for water. Apart from the MIP from ISRO, Chandrayaan also carried the M3 (Moon Minerology Mapper) and miniSAR both from NASA. Unlike CHACE, these two instruments continued to be on the Chandrayaan for its lifetime and continued beaming data and images till the end on August 29, 2009. Chandrayaan was launched on October 22, 2008, and was placed at a height of 100 km from the moon surface. So M3 and miniSAR looked at the moon from this 100 km distance.

The first images from M3 became available on November 22, 2008; soon it started sending more images of the moon. The advantage of M3 was that it had more than the 25 minutes that CHACE got to look at the moon. But CHACE had the advantage of getting a very close look at the moon. Till the very end till it impacted the moon CHACE was sending data.

Leading the M3 team was Dr. Carle M Pieters, from Brown University, USA, a distinguished scientist with many years of experience. She completed her PhD from MIT, USA, in 1977. She had overall responsibility for the success of the M3 instruments and the Science Team’s activities.

The first images from miniSAR became available on November 17, 2008. Leading the miniSAR team was Dr. Paul D. Spudis, from Lunar and Planetary Institute, USA, a well known scientist with many years of experience.

Both Dr. Pieters and Dr. Spudis had been part of several moon and space missions by NASA in the past. At the time of the Chandrayaan flight in 2008-2009, both Dr. Pieters and Dr. Spudis were well known experts whose views about water on the moon were respected by the scientific community. They had several papers to their credit in which they had speculated on the presence of water on the moon. As early as 1996, Dr. Spudis’ paper was published in Science, where he and his team had argued about the presence of ice on the moon. But in all these earlier works the evidence had been indirect.

ISRO's Dare to Dream Team

ISRO on the other hand did not have any star scientists. This was their first mission to the moon. Dr. Syed Maqbool Ahmed was chosen to head this team. Unlike the NASA scientists this team had zero experience in space borne instrumentation. Dr. Ahmed had obtained a PhD from Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and was an associate professor at the Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar. Dr. Ahmed moved from Ahmedabad to Trivandrum in 2006 and stayed for the duration that CHACE was being built.

Starting in 2006, Dr. Ahmed and his team worked for 2 years. First they had to create the lunar ambience in their lab. They created a vacuum to simulate the moon in their lab. Then they built CHACE, the most sensitive instrument to leave Earth’s gravity. In Dr. Ahmed’s own words they were designers, engineers, plumbers, electricians and payload scientists who "dared to dream."

The Race to Announce Water on the Moon

Soon after Chandrayaan was in the moon orbit, by early 2009 all the three teams had collected evidence of water on the moon. The race had begun. Who would be the first to announce it to the world? It was not like any of the teams had seen the water with their eyes. So before they could announce it, their finding had to be verified by other scientists.

It took the CHACE team a month to analyze the data and present their findings in the form of evidence to prove the presence of water on the moon. The CHACE team submitted their paper to Science in December 2008. Science is among the most respected journals in the world. Even one paper here is considered a lifetime achievement by most scientists. Their paper was rejected by the reviewers of Science and returned to them in March 2009. In April 2009 they submitted their paper to Nature, another respected journal. Nature also rejected their paper and returned it to them in July 2009.

Meanwhile Dr. Pieters’ team submitted their work to Science. Their paper was accepted in September, 2009 and appeared in Science on October 24, 2009. Based on this paper, on September 24, 2009, NASA and ISRO announced that water had been found on the moon. ISRO chief, Dr. Madhavan Nair, could only allude to the CHACE discovery. But since its findings were rejected by both Science and Nature he could not claim the credit on behalf of ISRO for finding water on the moon. So all he said was that MIP had ALSO found water while descending to the moon on November 14. But to the world the discovery was made by the NASA team lead by Dr. Pieters.

The CHACE team resubmitted their paper in November 2009 to Space and Planetary Sciences. This paper was accepted on March 8, 2010. But even prior to this Dr. Spudis’ team’s paper about ice on moon had been accepted in Geophysical Research Letters on February 22, 2010. Dr. Spudis' team had submitted their paper to this journal on December 22, 2009. They submitted a revised version on February 10, 2010.

The Indian team had come third in the race to find water on the moon.

"The Little Prince" by de Antoine de Saint-Exupéry starts with a Turkish astronomer discovering a new asteroid in early 1900, but when he announces it to the world, he is laughed away. Then, some years later, when he and other Turkish people started wearing western style clothes, he announced his discovery again, and this time it was welcomed and applauded. Does Dr. Ahmed’s team need a new set of clothes before Chandrayaan-2?

Read: The Chandrayaan-I and Water on the Moon Series

ISRO Finds Direct Evidence of Water on Moon

2010-03-16T18:08:00.006+05:30

Ice on Moon: But Again It Is Not an ISRO Instrument

2010-03-02T04:14:00.006+05:30

Mini-SAR is a small, low mass synthetic aperture radar that flew on the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 mission to the Moon has found thick deposits of water ice on the moon's north and south poles. Mini-SAR was designed to map the permanently dark areas of the lunar poles and characterize the nature of the deposits there. In the following paper that will soon appear in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors have reported their scientific findings:

Initial results for the north pole of the Moon from Mini-SAR, Chandrayaan-1 mission
P. D. Spudis¹, D. B. J. Bussey², B. Butler³, L. Carter⁴, M. Chakraborty⁵, J. Gillis-Davis⁶, J. Goswami ⁷, E. Heggy⁸, R. Kirk⁹, C. Neish², S. Nozette¹, W. Patterson ², M. Robinson¹⁰, R. K. Raney², T. Thompson⁸, B. J. Thompson², E. Ustinov⁸

¹ Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston TX, USA.
² Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel MD, USA
³ NRAO, Siccorro NM, USA.
⁴ NASM, Washington DC, USA
⁵ Indian Space Research Organization, Ahmedabad, India.
⁶ Univ. Hawaii, Honolulu HI, USA.
⁷ Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India
⁸ JPL, Pasadena CA, USA.
⁹ USGS, Flagstaff AZ, USA.
¹⁰ ASU, Tempe AZ, USA

This is a wonderful achievement. Two Indian Scientists, M. Chakraborty and J. Goswami, ISRO, Ahmedabad and PRL, Ahmedabad are listed as authors in this seminal paper.

But what happened to ISRO's own instruments? Mini-SAR was NASA's instrument riding on the Chandrayaan. In the earlier announcement in Science about water being found on moon, again the findings were based on NASA's instrument M3.

We have not heard anything of value being found from data collected by ISRO's own instruments. Was ISRO's role in Chandrayaan that of a carrier? I believe ISRO would have collected valuable data using its own instruments but has not been processing it. The moon mission was carried out with public money. Shouldn't the data be released to the wider Indian scientific community so that insights based on that data can be derived faster?

Read: The Chandrayaan-I and Water on the Moon Series

Carbon Cap VS India's Development

2010-02-24T12:22:00.006+05:30

Did you know India's per capita carbon emission is 1.6 tonnes per annum. Compare this to the world average of 3.6 tonnes per annum per person and the US emission average of 20.4 tonnes per annum per person and you see how the emissions are skewed.

The map below shows the per capita emission for different countries:

India has for long been arguing that decisions on capping world (and India's) emission levels should be taken from the per capita perspective. The caps will determine how much carbon India can emit in the future. Remember as India develops, emissions are likely to go up. So in other words carbon caps are a cap on development.

Developed countries are saying dont look at the per capita emissions. They are asking us to look at the map below which is based on total emissions by each country. Here as you can see India has a sizable emission.

The map below shows the total emission by country. The size of the country has been scaled based on its emission:

Developed countries want emission caps to be decided based on this map. But by this measure India's emissions cannot go up by much more in future.

The Indian government which was strongly pitching the per capita line till very recently seems to be bending and accepting total emission as a basis for caps.

Carbon Footprint: Think Smart

2010-01-07T06:01:00.007+05:30

Several airline booking sites tell you how much carbon dioxide your flight will emit. They even offer to plant trees to offset the carbon dioxide you will emit in your travel for a small fee. For example, a Delhi-Bangalore flight emits 194.5 Kgs of carbon dioxide, and a grown tree on average absorbs 20.3 Kgs of carbon in a year. Ofcourse many other everyday things we do emit carbon dioxide - we use electric appliances, drive cars, eat inorganically grown food, etc.

There are several carbon footprint calculators online including this one which is specifically made for people living in India. It seems the global average carbon footprint is 3.9 tonnes/annum and the Indian average is 1.6 tonnes/annum. And mine is 5 tonnes/annum. Ofcourse that is not counting the 4 trees I have planted in my lifetime so far :)

Anyway, is it really possible to reduce the average carbon footprint at an individual level? To see that I tried to see what is contributing to my 5 tonnes/annum output. I drive to office, I travel by air/train a few times a year. And it turns out driving to office and air/train trips are the major contributors to my carbon footprint. Without these two I am just below the national average at 1.59 tonnes/annum. Looks like I do most things other Indians do and additionally drive to work and travel by air/train more frequently.

As our economy grows, can we really cut down on travel? It seems natural to expect that there will be even more travel by more individuals. India has set a goal of 20 to 25 per cent reduction in carbon intensity by 2020, compared to the 2005 levels. In 2005 I am guessing the national average would have been close to 1.3 tonnes/annum per Indian. So India is committing to around 1 ton/annum/Indian.

In itself this is not a bad goal to have. But to get there are we up to the challenge of devising new technologies that allow us to grow but still have a smaller carbon footprint? Our schools and colleges are still hung up on teaching about old technologies and methods not catering to this green economy. A computer science course in IIT has no green computing methods in it. Graduates of our key institutions still come out having no knowledge about how to create the new technologies that will allow India to advance while still keeping our carbon commitments. We have many new IITs but all of them teach the same old courses in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering.

In the 90s we could get on the IT bandwagon because we produced computer science students and other technically qualified graduates in large numbers who could go out there and solve the problems in the IT area. But today we seem stuck on the model of creating more of these for a tomorrow that may require other skills.

Smart Meters

2009-11-20T05:35:00.002+05:30

Electricity needs to be consumed at the speed of light. So the very moment it is generated at a hydro electric, thermal, nuclear or wind power plant it needs to be consumed by some household or industry.

Usually electric supply companies provision for an average supply load. But what happens say during peak hours in the Delhi summer is that the demand far outstrips the supply, and that is when load shedding happens.

One very simple way of controlling this is to have smart meters that charge as per the supply demand curve. So when the demand is very high say during 5-9 pm when airconditioners and many other high consumption devices are on, the charge could be higher. This will prompt customers to only use the required appliances during this peak hour.

There is an initial cost of installing such meters but eventually the savings that they offer could be immense.

You Live in a City, Dont You?

2009-09-30T05:47:00.002+05:30

If you were to randomly ask that question to everybody on this earth, the probability of being correct is now over 50%.

As of 2007, over 50% of the world lives in cities. By 2050 this number will be over 70%. In India more than 40 cities have a population of over 1 million.

We associate urbanization with progress. For a country like India, economic and social progress has meant that more and more of us today live in cities.

But this also means that the cities are getting strained for resources. There is a strain on water, energy, transportation to name a few resources.

We need better ways to organize ourselves and distribute the available resources. We need to make the cities a livable environment for larger and larger number of people.

The current mode of development involves consumption of available resources without any means of replenishing them. This has led to rampant destruction of the environment.

How do you think we can allow the cities to grow and flourish without harming the environment?

ISRO Lacks Confidence

2009-09-26T09:05:00.010+05:30

The moon has water it has now been confirmed by analyzing data obtained from NASA's Moon Minerology Mapper (M3). In the following paper that appeared in Science, the authors have reported their scientific findings:

Character and Spatial Distribution of OH/H2O on the Surface of the Moon Seen by M3 on Chandrayaan-1
C. M. Pieters¹, J. N. Goswami², R. N. Clark³, M. Annadurai⁴, J. Boardman⁵, B. Buratti⁶, J.-P. Combe ⁷, M. D. Dyar⁸, R. Green⁶, J. W. Head¹, C. Hibbitts⁹, M. Hicks ⁶, P. Isaacson¹, R. Klima¹, G. Kramer⁷, S. Kumar¹⁰, E. Livo³, S. Lundeen⁶, E. Malaret¹¹, T. McCord⁷, J. Mustard¹, J. Nettles¹, N. Petro¹², C. Runyon¹³, M. Staid¹⁴, J. Sunshine¹⁵, L. A. Taylor¹⁶, S. Tompkins¹⁷, P. Varanasi⁶

¹ Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
² Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India.; Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore, India.
³ U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, CO 80225, USA.
⁴ Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore, India.
⁵ Analytical Imaging and Geophysics, Boulder, CO 80303, USA.
⁶ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA.
⁷ Bear Fight Center, Winthrop, WA 98862,USA.
⁸ Mt. Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075, USA.
⁹ Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD 20723–6005, USA.
¹⁰ National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad, India.
¹¹ Applied Coherent Technology Corporation, Herndon, VA 22070, USA.
¹² NASA Goddard, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
¹³ College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424, USA.
¹⁴ Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ 85719–2395, USA.
¹⁵ University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
¹⁶ University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996–1410, USA.
¹⁷ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, VA 22203, USA.

This is a wonderful achievement. Three Indian Scientists, J. N. Goswami, M. Annadurai and S. Kumar, from PRL, ISRO and NRSA are listed as authors in this seminal paper.

But what happened to ISRO's own instruments? M3 was NASA's instrument riding on the Chandrayaan. ISRO claimed that they had found water ten months ago when ISRO's own Moon Impact Probe (MIP) landed on the moon. But why did they wait for NASA to come out with the announcement first? Why didn't they have the confidence to come out with the findings before anyone else? Why couldn't ISRO beat NASA in announcing this seminal finding?

Why is ISRO sitting on the large amounts of data collected by various instruments aboard the Chandrayaan rather than analyzing it and beating others in making path breaking discoveries. In hindsight it is easy to look for information in the data. But why didnt the ISRO scientists draw the right conclusions at the right time from the data that they had. The fact remains that ISRO didnt have the confidence to beat NASA in this announcement.

But this is only the beginning, I hope ISRO will look closely into all the data they have collected over the past many months and come out with path breaking discoveries on their own rather than wait for others to lead the way.

Read: The Chandrayaan-I and Water on the Moon Series

Smart Architecture

2009-08-28T08:43:00.011+05:30

Delhi has officially felled 38000 trees in the past four years mostly for development purposes. Most of these trees have been cut for laying of the metro, flyovers, malls, new buildings, etc. Unofficial figures put the number of trees cut at over 50, 000.

The law in Delhi requires that every time you cut one tree you need to plant ten saplings. Often these saplings are not planted or they are planted in the outskirts and not cared for so they die off. The official figures for plantation of saplings show that about 60, 000 saplings have been planted whereas 380, 000 should have been planted.

Cut here plant there

But even the plantation policy has been flawed. Trees are being cut inside the city and the few saplings being planted are in the outskirts. The courts and biologists have questioned whether this is an effective response in terms of the environment.

Smart architecture: Incorporate the existing landscape

The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore has the policy that no tree can be cut on campus. Rather they have put the onus on the architects to construct buildings to incorporate the trees that are present in their designs. Obviously this is not always possible but it should be the intent always.

My office is in Vasant Kunj. Vasant Kunj in Delhi was recently populated in the 1980s and 1990s. It is in the northern edges of Aravali Hills and till recently it had thick forests (bani, in local parlance). All this has been cleared to construct houses, offices and malls. There is no trace of the hills which were once part of the landscape here. The architects and engineers came, blasted the rocks with dynamite, felled the trees and constructed buildings just like anywhere else. The result, this area does not retain its original character. Now just imagine if the architects had been smart and had incorporated the local landscape into their designs. The result would have been stunning to say the least. And also environmentally sane!

The Steam Engine Did it!

2009-08-21T09:21:00.013+05:30

There is an energy problem in the world today. And it seems to be growing.

Firstly there is insufficient energy for the exploding world population. Today about 1.6 billion people live without electricity. Of these 400 million are Indians. Even those who have access to electricity in their homes, have to face frequent power cuts. So there is need to ramp up production of energy to meet the growing needs.

Secondly the conventional sources of energy are very polluting for the environment. Over 50% of India's current power needs are fulfilled by coal based thermal power plants. Coal power plants produce about 80, 000 MW of power per year in India. A typical 500 megawatt coal plant burns 1.4 million tons of coal each year producing:
3.7 million tons of Carbon Dioxide
10,000 tons of Sulfur Dioxide
500 tons of small airborne particles
720 tons of Carbon Monoxide
10,200 tons of Nitrogen Oxide
170 pounds of Mercury
220 pounds of Arsenic

Well we all know what problems these gases and toxic elements produce: acid rain, smog, cancer, etc.

Now here is an interesting graph that shows how the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere has changed over the past one thousand years.

Atmospheric CO2 Concentration over centuries

The amount of atmospheric CO2 was steady for many hundreds of years and started rising just before 1800. Here is a closer look at those years when this rise in atmospheric carbon started:

Atmospheric CO2 levels Started Rising in 1769

Something seems to have happened in 1769. What was it? James Watt patented the Steam Engine that year!

Today steam engines are gone but every little piece of technology consumes power in some form or other. In this series that Jenelia kickstarted on this blog with her post on Emerging Green Technologies lets discuss possible roadblocks on the path to smarter utilization of technology and solutions for a greener planet. This post and the series is also inspired by a presentation made by Deva P Seetharam, a colleague who believes fervently that technology can green the planet.

Emerging Green Technologies Are the Future

2009-08-03T14:25:00.025+05:30

It took millions of years for fossil fuels to form. Unfortunately humankind has almost exhausted this precious resource within half a century! This deed has not only left us in a lurch but also has messed up Nature’s chain. While humankind released enormous green house gases, it also consumed up nature’s environment cleansing forests, which were the remedy. Today the only way to protect our world and yet keep it going is to find alternatives to the fast depleting fossil fuels. This is where green technologies come in.

Overview of Green Technologies

The energy consumption of the world has increased in multi-folds in the latter part of this century. Green technology is being predicted to be the effective alternative solution to meet the energy requirements as well as bring back nature to normalcy. Green technology is simply any technique that allows utilizing lower energy levels while delivering high output. This exciting green technology can be put to use in almost every sector. For example, in manipulating nature’s resources such as wind, water and light to generate electricity, constructing green buildings that are environment friendly in construction methods, efficiently managing data and compute farms in the IT sector where there’s a lot of energy consumption, in agriculture, and almost any other field that requires huge amounts of energy consumption or results in the emission of green house gases?

Lets look at the simple example of the use of green technology in buildings. There are several advantages in using green technology in today’s buildings. There are also challenges.

Advantages of Green Buildings

There are various immediate as well as long term benefits of using green technology in buildings. Advantages of using green technology include making the environment within and outside the building healthy and cozy; saving much needed energy and water; reducing the construction cost by using recycled materials; lowering the levels of construction and demolition wastage; increasing the value of property; using renewable energy resources; improving air quality; using materials that are long lasting and easy to maintain. The major challenge is the non availability of skilled workers with knowledge in green construction techniques.

Green Building Concept
Image Courtesy: http://www.mlit.go.jp

To reverse the damage to nature and to have a sustainable future, mankind must invest in green technologies. It seems the so called third world countries have a lead in this and may push other nations to the rear in the adoption of green technologies. Asian countries are keen to adopt technologies. President Obama exposed his fears in a press meet and here is a quote from his speech. "There's no longer a question about whether the jobs and the industries of the 21st century will be centered around clean, renewable energy. The only question is: which country will create these jobs and these industries? And I want that answer to be the United States of America." To their credit Asian giants like India and China have been surprisingly keen to invest huge sums in green technologies! The future may well be theirs if they succeed in doing that.

This article is contributed by Jenelia Watson, a technology geek who is also a web designer and SEO expert. She maintains several websites including Educational Courses, Microsoft Certification, Web Hosting Services, PC Security Software, and Wireless Surveillance Security Camera. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: jeneliawatson@gmail.com.

Why is Technology Adoption Happenning Faster Today?

2009-06-18T04:52:00.002+05:30

Cooley and Yorukoglu made some very interesting observations in their 2003 paper about the adoption of technology. They suggested that as a society we are adopting technology much faster today. Their observations are summarized in the table below.

Invention	Year Invented	Years to Adoption
		by 25% households
Electricity	1873	46
Telephone	1876	35
Automobile	1886	55
Airplane	1903	64
Radio	1906	22
TV	1926	26
VCR	1952	34
Microwave Oven	1953	30
Personal Computer	1975	16
Cellular Phone	1983	13
Internet	1991	7

What are the reasons for this? Let us know what you think are the reasons for this. Let me put forth mine to start a discussion:

Technology is being produced at cheaper cost.
Society today is "rich" and can afford to buy the technology.
Technology has become a part of our daily lives in work and play and we have become dependent on it.
Technology is used to fill time and space in our lives.

Conformism Leads to More Intelligence!

2009-06-03T05:00:00.007+05:30

In the past hundred years we have made more technological and scientific progress than in the past many centuries. Consider the following advances:

Our knowledge of the universe has increased tremendously
Advances in medicine save more lives than ever before
Technology has improved the quality of life many fold
Crop yields per hectare have multiplied

What brought about these advances in the past 100 years, did man suddenly evolve into a more intelligent being? That is very unlikely so we can rule out biological possibilities and conclude that the human brain hasn't changed in the past hundred years.

But then why has there been a surge in the advances being made by mankind? In the 1800's the gap between advances made from one generation to the next was very small. Today the gap in terms of capability, between generations, is huge. This generation has made major technological and scientific advances compared to earlier ones, and the next is likely to achieve even greater things.

Biologically the human brain hasn't changed, but the way we think seems to have changed and that has resulted in the humans of today being more intelligent than those before.

I am going to argue that humans have become more conformist and that has resulted in our making these advances:

Food: Close to 90% of the world population subsists on three cereals - wheat, rice and maize. The top twenty crops account for about 80% of the cultivated area today. A hundred years back they accounted for less than 30%. What this means is that diets today across the world are getting more and more similar. [This means that today farmers have an easier job, food processing companies have an easier job, transporters have an easier job, all resulting in higher productivity and better food security.]
Education: Today every child in every country undergoes twelve years of schooling and the curriculum is very similar. Basically a majority of humans by age 20 have gathered roughly similar knowledge in science, geography, history, mathematics, etc. Education was never this standardized in earlier times. Different people learnt different skills based on social, economic and local community needs. [Modern day schooling ensures that knowledge is evenly spread. As soon as new knowledge is created it is quickly absorbed and disseminated.]
Employment: Nine to Five jobs are a recent occurrence, so is the concept of weekend holidays. The growth of corporations as employers is also a recent phenomenon. There are clear and well defined ways of making a living. Earlier people were mostly self employed and people had to search for new ways of making a livelihood. [This means livelihood is assured for a majority of the people today resulting in more people being able to engage in creating knowledge.]

I would love to get your comments. My thoughts on this are very preliminary.

Chatting With a Computer?

2009-05-27T05:00:00.001+05:30

We all chat on instant messaging applications like Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, but have you ever had multiple conversations going with your messenger friends at the same time and found it difficult to manage? Well we can manage about five conversations simultaneously but anything more and it becomes difficult. Have you ever wished a chat bot could handle some of your conversations while you finish up with the others?

Well it turns out that handling conversations for computers is hard because question answering is not easy for them. Computers programs are excellent at search. All of us know how fast Google is able to retrieve documents. Search works with the computer indexing all the documents available on the web and as soon as you fire a query, by initiating a search through this index to find documents matching your query. In this the whole web is a library in which each document is indexed by the words it contains.

Question answering is harder because the computer now has to find a specific answer to your query. Say you want to know what weather is good for growing grapes. Google can find you all documents containing grapes, weather and grow as keywords, but it cant give you the answer. Worse if you wanted to know what weather is not good for growing grapes, search would most probably return the same set of documents. Also ambiguity is hard to figure for computers. "Did you shoot Dana?" Are you referring to shooting your friend, making a movie called Dana, then there could be many Dana's so which Dana? Humans also use sarcasm and humour which is very hard for computers to understand.

Still people have attempted to build chatbots and the quality of chatbots has been steadily improving. While the IBM Watson system that will compete on Jeopardy is not a chatbot, it still has to learn how to answer questions posed to it. There is the expectation that this system will spur dialog technology and in the next few years we will start seeing chatbots that could take your place in chatting with your friends on instant messengers.

Watson: Computers vs Humans at Jeopardy

2009-05-12T17:11:00.006+05:30

IBM is building a question answering system to take on humans at Jeopardy.

Jeopardy contestants need to know a broad range of topics like history, literature, science, pop culture, among many others. Jeopardy has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and must phrase their responses in the form of a question. The contestants need to provide accurate responses at high speed based on clues that involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities. Watson the computer that will play Jeopardy will learn to do all this.

Watson will be an advanced Question Answering system that can rival human's in their ability to answer natural language questions.

In 1950 Alan Turing had set the test for intelligence to be the ability of a machine to fool a human interrogator into thinking that it is human. Turing proposed that the human interrogator hold a text based natural language conversation with a human and a machine, where both the human and the machine try to appear human. If at the end of the conversation the interrogator is unable to reliably decide which is the human and which is the machine then he said the machine must be considered intelligent.

Interestingly Turing had predicted that such systems will be built by 2000. Of course we are in 2009 and we still dont have such systems. Could Watson be the first step towards such a system? In Turing's test the questions could be on any topic, but Watson will limit itself to the specific format of Jeopardy.

Some people may argue that afterall humans will program the computer so the computer cannot be considered intelligent. Okay here is my counter to that: In 1997 Deep Blue (IBMs supercomputer) beat Garry Kasparov in chess matchplay. The people who programmed deep blue were five computer science researchers and one chess international master, who together would have been no match for Garry Kasparov. Obviously the computer added that something which could defeat Kasparov?

Silicon Heads: Programmable People

2009-04-22T08:02:00.004+05:30

Can people be programmed. When computers get intelligence it is said that they have been imparted artificial intelligence. But what about computer like programming of humans.

We all go through at least 12 years of schooling and this, for sure, heavily influences how we think. Also it is well known that we imbibe the local cultures, thoughts and beliefs so that by the time we are about twenty we are rigid in our ideas about say marriage, politics, religion, etc.

Or worse many people get indoctrinated by belief systems being spread by vested interests. Terrorists are brainwashed into holding strong beliefs. Even politicians push their beliefs and common people get steeped into them. Whether it is slogans like "You are with us or against us" which Bush effectively used to quell opposition and drum up support for his Iraq plan or well thought out doctrines like terrorism, the idea is to get mass following without questioning the idea itself.

Most of us like to believe that we cannot be programmed. We like to believe that our thoughts are our own and that we have not been influenced by anyone into thinking them. But it is well known that people are vulnerable to being programmed. In Britain for instance the fight against terrorism involves protecting young muslims from predatory Al-Queda operatives who will catch the innocent youngsters and indoctrinate them with their bad ideas and program them into becoming terrorists.

But such programming is not limited to terrorist organizations. In everyday life most of us get programmed by media. Media is known to influence public thought. Evidence of this lies in people choosing highly advertised brands over less advertised ones. Simply put advertising programmes our likes and dislikes.

But being programmable has its advantages. A lot of todays advances can be attributed to the schooling structure that has been in place in the recent decades. This allows scientific temperament to be inculcated at a young age allowing kids to make contributions to science and technology later in life. In earlier centuries human thought was not focussed and perhaps that didnt allow technological advances to be made?

Who is More Intelligent, Father or Son

2009-04-08T08:06:00.002+05:30

Is man getting more intelligent? In the past century we have learnt many things about the universe, human body, and invented new technology to make our lives simpler.

We have probably learnt more about our surroundings in the past few years than we did in the past many centuries.

Does this mean that humans today (who made all this progress in terms of acquiring knowledge) are more intelligent than their predecessors?

More precisely, does this mean you are more intelligent than your parents? Does this mean your children will be more intelligent than you? Is human intelligence evolving so fast? After all recent generations have made so many new discoveries that our predecessors could not even imagine.

Inherent Intelligence

2009-03-15T18:00:00.003+05:30

If I jump up I am bound to return to the ground. Do I return because of any special effort on my part? No that is inherent intelligence present in the universe.

Intelligent Universe

Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, had argued in the late nineties that just six basic numbers define the universe. And these numbers are so precisely set that if they had been off by even 0.001 our universe may not have been stable and could not have supported life as we know it. For example, if one of the numbers called the nuclear force that glues together protons and neutrons had been 0.006 instead of 0.007, then the universe would have been full of only hydrogen atoms. This means carbon and other atomic forms necessary for life would not have been possible.

Rees argued that multiple universes started out each with their own six numbers. But only our universe survived and flourished because the six numbers were just right in this universe. Others argue that God set the knobs giving the exact values for all the right numbers for this universe to flourish.

Well whichever way the numbers came about, the fact is that they encode an inherent intelligence into the the system that allows life to sustain itself on earth. Call them laws of Physics, Biology, Chemistry or call them God's will, the fact is that you and I don't have to make a special effort to make the universe run. In fact it is the universe that makes us run. If I jump I am bound to return back to the ground and not fly off into space. If I push an object it offers me resistance. The chemical reactions in my stomach to digest food happen based on an inherent intelligence built into the system.

Intelligent Organization

Intelligence is encoded into every system, even organizations. For example, when a customer's order reaches a company, a process to respond to it gets initiated. Mature organizations have more intelligence encoded into the system and can handle different kinds of eventualities better. Even surprises get taken care of easily by them. The intelligence in the organization is a set of rules or processes that get followed.

Rules is Intelligence?

The organization's intelligence could be termed artificial because it is comprised of the intelligence of the people in it. It is their experience that is showing through as intelligence. But remember you could change the set of people in the organization and still the organization would run properly because each response is already encoded as a rule or process.

What about the universe? It is doing very well without any human intervention. Also the universe seems to know enough to keep the planets turning, the rivers flowing, so that life is sustained in it. Again intelligence in the form of rules or laws of Physics, Chemistry and Biology is inherent in the system.

So at one level can we argue that intelligence is a set of rules? These rules encode the intelligence inherent in a system. These rules have probably evolved over time to make the system effective, but they are still rules and they support life?

Intelligence in Artifical Worlds

2009-03-02T17:28:00.003+05:30

Could an intelligent world exist within your computer?

There are various virtual worlds that exist inside computers today:

There are virtual worlds like Second Life that have been deliberately created
There are virtual worlds within computer games

First lets examine what happens in these virtual worlds. When a participant enters Second Life, she comes across a world that she has created along with the other participants. So if she constructs a house, this house is now part of Second Life and she and others in this virtual world can see it and enter it and perform various activities inside it.

In a computer game the player enters the virtual world and plays a game envisioned by the creator of the game. For example, in a racing game the player could be one of the cars participating in the race. The race track, the number of cars, and the whole environment inside the game has been previously envisioned and created by the creator of the game.

Artificial AI

The intelligence of these virtual worlds comes from the intelligence of the participants who are controlling their avatars to behave in certain ways. It also comes from the creators of the objects inside these worlds. In the case of Second Life the person who created the house decided its architecture. In the case of a computer game the creator of the game envisioned the gameplay.

In computer games today Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of gameplay. Often situations are added within the game to make gameplay appear intelligent. So for example, if you hit a lot of shots with your backhand the computer game learns to adapt, just as a human opponent on a tennis court would. In a game of shooting, your opponent would evade your bullets by ducking, rolling, just as a human would.

Real Intelligence

But is there any real intelligence in these virtual worlds. Before we decide whether there is any real intelligence we probably have to define what would be considered intelligence. Without getting too ambitious we will define intelligence to be something taking place within the game that is not envisioned by the creators.

Let me give some examples of what I consider intelligent behaviour and then you can decide whether or not that is really intelligent.

In a computer game a multiplicity of simple events may lead to emergent behaviour. Lets take this example from Wikipedia, take a racing game in which cars are programmed to avoid crashing, and they encounter an obstacle in the track: the cars might then maneuver to avoid the obstacle causing the cars behind them to slow and/or maneuver to accommodate the cars in front of them and the obstacle. The programmer never wrote code to specifically create a traffic jam, yet one now exists in the game.
Let us consider another example. One could create a world in Second Life or any other virtual world and populate it with happiness seeking humanoids. These humanoids though inherently similar could all start to behave uniquely based on what they choose/encounter for getting happiness. One humanoid could start hitting other humanoids, another could start kissing other humanoids, another could start playing with the rocks available in its environment and so on. Each humanoid would start behaving in ways in which the creator of this world never imagined.

I think virtual worlds are beginning to have small amounts of intelligence in them. This is just the start. More and more intelligence will be incorporated into the virtual worlds. That is my premise do you agree?

Slumdog in Second Life

2009-02-26T16:11:00.007+05:30

Would you like to be a slumdog? The recent success of the movie has brought to the fore the lives of people living in the slums. For many people this was their first exposure to slums and the lives of the people in them.

Are there any slums in the virtual world? Well there are pictures of slums on the internet but nothing that can really be called a slum. Will there be slums in the virtual world in future? Well my belief is that we will see the first virtual slums in Second Life.

For those who dont know let me start by describing Second Life. Second Life is an online virtual world created by its residents. The residents of Second Life are avatars who can interact with each other and engage in various activities. Avatars dont have to be human. You could become a vegetable, mineral or animal in Second Life.

Interestingly Second Life and real life have begun to converge in interesting ways. Maldives, Sweden, Malta, and other countries, have embassies in Second Life. Islam Online has created Mecca in Second Life where one can go on a Haj. LifeChurch.tv has twelve branches, eleven on mainland USA and one in Second Life. Second Life even has a currency that is pegged to the major currencies of the world. Money earned in Second Life can actually be converted to real money. In second life one can use money to buy property, goods and services. Land and many other things in Second Life cost money and one can trade in them.

I think it is only a matter of time before someone buys land in Second Life and develops a slum. Visitors could comfortably sit in front of their computer and experience the slums, just as we watched the movie Slumdog Millionaire sitting on a comfortable chair eating popcorn. The experience in Second Life would be more real than watching a movie because you would actually be participating in living in a slum with other residents. You would be a slumdog. Life for the slumdogs of this virtual slum would be just as unpredictable as life in Dharavi. This method of visiting and participating in slum life could have many takers because one can avoid the stench, the poverty, the beggars, and most of all the guilt.

Gaming, The Next Level!

2009-02-10T14:01:00.006+05:30

Have you noticed the enthusiasm displayed by children when playing computer games? “Shoot at the monster on the left, and pick up the ammunition in the corner.” Children display an adrenalin rush when playing computer games. In fact educators have realized the potential of games and now many educational games are available in the market. Adults have also taken to gaming in a big way. A part of astronaut training includes playing computer games. Even the armed forces use computer games to familiarize soldiers with real combat situations. Studies have shown that computer game players have better visuo-motor skills. The video games market in India was estimated at Rs. 700 crores in 2008.

Today computer games can be played on mobile phones, laptops and specialized gaming consoles. After the Iraq shoe throwing incident, there are numerous games available where the player has to throw shoes at an image of Bush. Similarly after the Hudson river plane landing, games are available where the player has to safely land a plane in the river and save all the passengers. There are multiple games based on Bollywood characters.

History of gaming

Gaming requires a screen to view images and characters present in the game, a speaker to play audio and a handheld input device using which the player can control the play. The handheld controller could be a keyboard or a mouse or a specialized game controller consisting of joysticks, buttons and/or rollers.

If you ask an avid gamer what the major improvement in gaming has been over the years, he will tell you it is better graphics and sound. Indeed cleaner graphics and good audio quality have been the major focus of game developers. Today gaming consoles like PlayStation and Xbox use large processing power in the form of dedicated 32- and 64-bit processors resulting in high definition graphics and crystal clear sound. They use advanced image filtering techniques to render smoother textures in the image.

The input device has so far been limited to the handheld controller. Recently Nintendo launched the Wii console which is the first handheld controller to use motion sensing as part of gameplay. The Wii handheld controller includes a spatial motion sensor that allows sensing of the players arm position and orientation. Every movement of the arm is captured by the sensor and forms part of the players response to the game. By adding this one feature the Wii console easily became one of the hottest selling video game consoles.

So this is today. What does the future of gaming look like? What should game designers be focusing on?

Attentive controllers are the future of gaming

Humans are adept at using their hands. So while it is natural to provide inputs using our hands, other forms of input are also possible. To communicate we use speech, facial expressions, eyes, hand gestures and body movements. It is natural to include these forms of input also into gameplaying. The next generation will see us moving from handheld controllers to attentive controllers. Attentive controllers are game controllers that not only take input from our hand but also allow input in the form of speech, vision and motion. Wii has begun to address the last of these by incorporating one form of motion, that of the hands holding the controller.

Heightening the gaming experience is one of the major aims of game designers. Indeed the future will belong to games that allow better player-device interaction. Wii created a flutter in the gaming world by incorporating motion sensing as a new input dimension. But speech, vision and possibly other forms of motion like, gestures can also be captured. Startups in the gaming space have an opportunity to make a major impact on the gaming industry by building attentive controllers that take the gaming experience to the next level. Also importantly speech, vision and motion are mature technologies so these attentive controllers can be built with innovative use of existing technologies.

Incorporating speech recognition into games will enhance the gameplay and also lead to more complex storylines. Say during the game you could ask, “How far to the next ammunition facility?” Today speech recognition and dialog technology have advanced enough to recognize sentences like these and act on them. The response could be spoken back by the computer. Such technology would allow near realistic gameplay situations to be created. In F1 racing the driver often asks questions to his team. Question answering could now be incorporated into the F1 video game.

Gaze following technology has improved enough to know which part of the screen the player is looking. Gaming strategies could be evolved based on this. For example to make the game more challenging and interesting, the bad guys could sneak up on you from the side of the screen that you are not paying attention to. This could lead to gameplay strategies where the player pretends to be looking somewhere to fool the system into making a specific move.

The challenge is now on console designers to build attentive controllers that can take other forms of input from the player. Speech, vision and motion technologies have matured so they can be incorporated into the controller. Gameplay and storyline could then be built around the use of such attentive controllers, taking the gaming experience to the next level.

Home Minister ji There Is A Hole In The Coastal Command

2009-02-06T11:00:00.003+05:30

It has been over two months since the Mumbai Terror attacks on 26 Nov. A lot had been promised by our government and some changes have already happened.

Where do we stand with the coastal command structure that was proposed by the Home Minister. From what I have heard so far, I see a major hole in the proposed coastal command.

Home Minister Chidambaram has been talking about the new coastal command that is being set up in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks. The components of this coastal command seem to be the following:

Basic infrastructure

Set up maritime security command under Indian Navy supervision

Set up an intelligence network connecting the security command with coastal police stations, the home ministry and intelligence agencies
Increase number of coastal police stations
Purchase boats and better equipment for coastal police, coast guard and Navy
Set up helipads along the coasts

Prevention

Increase patrolling of the coasts using speed boats and helicopters
Increase manned surveillance of roads along the coasts
Improved Radar surveillance along coastline
Automatic Identification System for all sea vessels to monitor identity, speed, location and course
Biometric Identity cards for fishermen

Crisis response

Set up zonal crisis management cells
Equip marine police and coast guards with latest firearms
Designate hospitals in coastal zones and prepare them to handle emergency situations

This is great but....

The Hole

I agree the marine police, coast guard and navy need the best and the latest equipment. But the plan so far looks heavily dependent on having more security men. It also seems to be saying, come and do your thing Mr. Terrorist and we will try to catch you. Instead what we really need to be saying is dont even try anything because we will surely catch you even before you reach our shores.

Home Minister Chidambaram's approach to me seems to be only about providing better fire power to the forces and on physical surveillance of the seas. It is necessary to do that but our aim should be to make sure they are stopped at sea. But to do that is it enough to just patrol the seas using boats. In a mall which is usually less than 100m x 100m in size how many security men do we require to monitor the premises? Well without CCTV cameras it turns out that a mall would require at least 150-200 security men working in 3 shifts. The Indian coasts are much much bigger. So how many coast guards will we require? The answer is too many.

It is very clear that a surveillance system that is based entirely on physical monitoring by coast guards and police is not enough. Just like the mall requires CCTV systems to reduce the load and make security more effective, the seas need electronic surveillance and not just an increased number of well armed coast guards.

Put in the combat multipliers

A good security force makes intelligent use of combat multipliers.

What is a combat multiplier? A combat multiplier is technology and intelligence that allows non linear scaling. Which means that with just a few security men the force is effective in stopping attacks.

Till some years back an army was as good as the number of soldiers it had. Then slowly missiles, bombs, tanks, aircrafts, aircraft carriers, submarines etc. were introduced which allowed an army to scale up non linearly. Army men armed with spears were needed in large numbers. With guns, you needed fewer men to inflict the same damage. With missiles and bombs you needed even fewer.

In the Mumbai attack what if the terrorists had been intercepted at sea? Once they had reached the hotels and other destinations, no matter how good the guns our police force was carrying, it was very difficult to stop them from causing damage. So in this case the combat multiplier would have been better surveillance of our coasts, of our hotels and stations, to stop the terrorists early. Once the terrorists had taken up their positions, they became very powerful.

What must be put in place

We must have:

Networked Sonar and Radar net around the coasts
Aerial surveillance using ISRO satellites

Our Home Minister must think of using sonar, radar and satellites to do the surveillance. He has talked very fleetingly about increased radar surveillance and automatic identification system for ships, but that idea needs to be broadened and its scope increased. Only then it will have the necessary combat multiplier effect. This can be the CCTV system of the seas. The coast guard then becomes even more effective by utilizing this intelligence. So in addition to the things already proposed by him, the Home Minister must put in place a system to provide electronic surveillance of our seas and coasts. Such a system can be put in place by utilizing the combined knowledge of ISRO, DRDO and other research organizations in the country.

Also Read:
Coastal command structure
Securing our coasts against terrorists and enemies

Read: Complete Counter Terror Series

Terrorism and Media: Transmission or Communication?

2009-02-03T01:00:00.041+05:30

In a media-saturated and media-consuming world, is terrorism a "noun" or a "verb"?

“Kill one person and frighten ten thousand” -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War (circa 500 BCE).

In the above quotation by Sun Tzu lies the kernel of my arguments. I would like to begin by outlining that this essay does not claim to be a conclusive and unproblematic argument about terrorism and the media. Though I am acutely aware of its limitations, it should not stop us from engaging in intellectual speculations about the nature and discourse of terrorism and the manner in which it is articulated in public and private spheres. I stress the word speculation because I begin with the assertion that though a widely used term, social "truth" is an elusive one (truth as in material and empirical facts). It is not my objective to play philosophical tricks, so let us try to tackle a simple proposition: if a group of religiously motivated individuals' objective is the undermining of liberal societies and they achieve this by exploiting modern technologies, social networks to evade the law, cause destruction, and operate with impunity, what should be the response of a "liberal" society? Should it engage in a widespread program of surveillance and controls? Would it then continue to be a "liberal" society? Playing the devils advocate, I could pose a counter question. If we did not exercise controls and track every individual, wouldn't the terrorists take over the society. Here lies the problem. Terrorism is not a phenomenon new to the 21st century. As evidenced by Arthur H. Garrison in his study of 18th, 19th, and 20th century terrorists -- from Maximilien Robespierre, Johann Most, bin Laden, the Army of God, the Animal Liberation Front to the Earth Liberation Front -- there has been no change in the idea of terrorism as a tool of social change over the last three centuries (see Garrison:2004). Though his cause, techniques, and destruction may be different, Osama bin Laden's use of terrorism is for no different purpose from that of Maximilien Robespierre.

At the same time, the modern liberal democratic state has survived and evolved over a similar period. On the other hand, the gains of liberal democracies are being lost in our response to terrorism, chiefly by imagining this as a new problem. These are the broader contours that inform my essay. Let us begin by examining pragmatist calls made by tough-talking politicians and policy wonks to tackle the problem of terror:

In the above clip, Narendra Modi, talking to Prabhu Chawla, argues that because of the tough nature and resolve of his administration, no terrorist attack has taken place in Gujarat over the last five years and goes on to presents a commonsensical argument for new tough laws against terrorism. The tough laws he refers to here is the need for the reinstatment of the dreaded POTA and the introduction of newer laws. The entire bluster falls flat when Chawla asks why the need for new laws when he has thwarted terrorist activities under existing laws. The inimical Modi sidesteps the question.

Democratic Response to Terror

Our response to terror -- war on terror -- is unlike historical notions of war between states. And the term "war on terror" or terms such as "Mumbai 26/11", which is nothing but a mimesis of 9/11, is an erroneous argument because such metaphorical labels seek to appropriate notions of "war" (as as the World Wars) to raise the salience of certain actions by the state. Recent history provides us adequate example -- Cold War, War on Terror -- that these actions have some, if not entirely, underpinnings that go against the idea of "liberal", "moral", and "enlightened" societies. Thus, we end up in illiberal positions such as justification of collateral damage and the very redefinition of the democratic state. For example, torture, a means of information gathering, policing, coercion, and social control, that can only be imagined as a medieval idea is now socially acceptable in liberal democratic societies such as USA. In India, the police is widely known to use torture as a means of extracting confessions. As argued by Stuhr:

Americans have managed to become more vulnerable than ever before in their own eyes and, at the same time, more aggressive in the eyes of the others than ever before in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, more patriotic (at least superficially) and self-professedly peace loving at home and, simultaneously, more hated and perceived as war mongering abroad, at once the most vocal opponent of weapons of mass destruction and the nation most heavily armed with weapons of mass destruction, and thoroughly determined to act decisively while equally determined to avoid critical self-reflection (Stuhr:2004)

The above essay was prophetically written by Stuhr in 2004 as Obama echoed similar sentiments about USA's fall from grace. How did the "beacon of liberty" get to this? To begin with, I refer to our understanding of terrorism, which is largely based on (a) the tele-visual and pervasive nature of modern media and communications; (b) the liberal economics driving news organisations that profit from the relaying of acts of "terrorism" and "mean world beliefs" (see footnote 2); (c) newsroom ideologies that identify with conservative and martial elements in the policy and political realm who seek to present solutions that seek to erode any discourse about democracy, justice, and rule of law (see footnote 1). My claim is that the Indian media and policy elites have come together to mimic US establishment and the media in the Cold War and post Cold War era, particularly 9/11. The logic of deterrence offered is based on the framing of one set of people as "enemies" having an agenda against "us"; their "misuse" of our human rights laws. Evidence shows that the response of the "liberal state" is one that is leading to curbing of liberties earned through centuries of struggle, and collateral damage of innocent civilians. Without painting a conspiratorial picture, I argue that the three conditions outlined earlier have unintended consequences and these are not suited for a just and democratic society, primarily because it seeks to portray terrorism as a new and pressing problem raising its salience over other equally important issues. The central problem here is of agenda setting and public opinion shaping by people with a certain viewpoint (mean world beliefs). These individuals and groups have the characteristic of mimicing each other -- both on the terrorists' side as well as the democratic side. This is contrary to the claims that media in a liberal economic regime and new communication technologies will lead to greater human enlightenment, thus the argument here that all we are getting through mainstream media is transmission and not communication.

News Framing

Let us understand a basic axiom: Terrorism is 99 per cent a communicative exercise and 1 percent factual violence (Professor Philip Taylor, personal interview). By this I mean the symbolic intimidation of individuals and groups is far greater than the empirical and material acts of violence or intimidation. Take the recent case of the Mangalore assault on women by members of Shri Ram Sene. Though it is only one incident in a huge list of crimes against women in India, its widespread coverage in the media has served to form attitudes and beliefs about and towards groups and issues. Gender issues rarely get the kind of sustained coverage that this one incident has received. While the liberal media has expressed outrage, politicians have come forward to exploit the wider moral panic of a largely conservative Indian society on the issue of women exercising their right to do whatever they feel like. The issue, though simple on the surface, is far more complex.

We are relentlessly barraged by news by mainstream news organisation that "imagine" news for us, that is to say they enclose an event in a world out there (like a photo frame) in an organised and selective way to tell us what is at issue, and it plays a role in influencing how we think about things. To understand this better let us take a few steps back. For example the events at Nandigram have been framed as anti-development by those believing in free market driven industrialisation and development; human rights advocates have framed it as an issue of violence by the state against its own citizens in support of capitalist interests; others have framed it as a rural uprising against an elite conception of development.

When we apply the above-mentioned principle to the Mangalore case we note that Times Now framed it as an issue of "moral policing" inviting “shock” barely concealing its liberal bourgeoisie outlook. Times Now had an array of frames by which the event could have been explained, helping us understand it in all its complexity. For example, parochialism, feudalism, patriarchy, anti-globalisation, right-wing politics, morality, censorship, gender, Hindu fundamentalism, voyeurism, technology. The "active and informed consumer of news" in us should be motivated to ask more questions about such portrayal. After we have informed ourselves of the complexity of the situation, we can ask another question. Does the immediacy of the news media coverage trigger a pathological response, one that is based on dominant and popular views. We note that in the Mangalore case, the media has largely stuck to the frame of "moral policing", when the event is far more complex. Similarly, we can ponder over questions of what frames are being excluded in presenting to us the "war against terror"? Are we part of the pathological response -- mimetic fear and hatred coupled with an asymmetrical willingness and capacity to destroy the other without the formalities of war.

Terrorism as a Frame

Isn't it ironic that the Cold War period, during which we had the greatest threat of global annihilation, fear, paranoia and mistrust, we had comparative order and peace (that is to say despite the mistrust between the West and the Soviet Bloc and their capabilities to annihilate the entire world, none of the apocalyptic fear actually came true). On the other hand, with the spread of global capital and democracy in the last two decades we have mutual hatred and actual acts of brutal violence by both democratic and anti-democratic parties, the invasion of Iraq being a prime example. We are constantly bombarded by the term terrorism but we fail to understand what it is. All we know is that certain individuals and groups hate "us". Who is this "us" and "them"; what do they hate us for; what have we done to invite this hate -- these issues are presented within televisual and verbal frames fear that invariably result in "mean world beliefs" (see footnote 2) leading to predictable responses. For example, post Nov 26, 2008, Barkha Dutt unwittingly stated on a live talk show, “let us all agree to give up some freedoms”. She was furthering the consensus building of an idea that required nuanced debate and discussion. Unfortunately, her objective at a debate got co-opted by reactionary voices -- a panel of Mumbai elites -- who foregrounded her pronouncement with calls such as “let us carpet bomb Pakistan”. Dr Paul Boxer of Rutgers University, who I recently interviewed, has argued that "media coverage can easily reinforce any latent stereotypes already held, and help to generate new biases in thinking". This is what I had referred to earlier as triggers to a "pathological response". James Der Derian presents the following facts:

When one takes into account how war-related fatalities have been reversed in modern times, from 100 years ago when one civilian was killed per eight soldiers, to the current ratio of eight civilians per soldier killed, then compares the similarly-skewed combatant-to-non-combatant casualty figures of 9/11, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War, the terror/counter-terror distinction begins to fade even further. (Der Derian:2005)

Subjective violence (see footnote 3), once restricted to either the darkest forces of any society or the specific arms of the state is now effectively determining civilian policy. Thus we have the honourable Narendra Modi suggesting that we should enact laws that allow surveillance of anybody who is suspect by the state (link). After the departure of George Bush, evidence is emerging from behind the US security and surveillance regime that shows that their coverage of suspects extended to anybody and everybody including leading journalists, literally turning a democratic society into one that was beginning to mimic exactly those individuals and groups who hated us link). Those who hate us are largely the fundamentalist, religious, other, or to point to the elephant in the room, the Muslim. But what about Shri Ram Sene? Aren't they exactly mimicking the Taliban? What about Lt Col Purohit? What about the killing of Christians in Orissa in 2008? Why do we form clear distinctions between terror inflicted by our guys and by the "other" guys? It is particularly instructive that the "other" guys are presented as different, who have to be marked as such either by way of their physical features, cultural differences, political world views into a neat package of fear and loathing. This is demonstrated in two illustrations that I will talk about.

Spectacles and Social Porn

News narratives are complex, especially during times of crises. Journalism professional values often call for striking a balance between the various demands of the sociology of journalism with a focus on balance and fairness. This is not a simple case of reporting or copy editing, but works at various filtering mechanisms such as newsroom culture, biases and ideology, shared values, competition etc. The 19 Sep police storming of Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi following the 13 Sep explosions presented journalists with an unfolding story that would be challenging to any newsrooms.

A few days later the police presented a few suspects in the full glare of the media with their heads covered in the Keffiyeh, a head covering widely used in the Arabic world. Whatever be the facts of this particular incident, the symbolic dimension of the act cannot be wished away. There is a problematic blurring of the spectacles provided by the terrorist acts and the subsequent police and media discourse. This visual bombardment by both the police and the media takes the focus away from the onus of proof and investigation. Terrorism defined as acts of barbaric killing, coercion, or subjugation of other humans in any form is an immoral spectacle. But that has to be countered with science/efficiency, rule of law, morality, and dignity, and not a counter spectacle.

What do the above images signify? To what extent is the police, the media, and the readers all deriving the same message about the terrorists -- that they are different and need to be differentiated, are Muslims, and have a teleological link to the Arabic world. The underlying and dangerous assumptions, though unstated, are clear (also see footnote 4). Journalists and critics would justify the above spectacle as merely the consequence of the terrorists own actions. There is some truth in that. We cannot draw moral equivalence between the actions of terrorists and those of police officers. However, there is a wider mimetic tendency going on here. The police and the media have joined the terrorists to add another spectacle that focuses on presenting terrorists as objects, rather than restricting them as perpetrators of a crime that can be dealt within a democratic rule of law. The latter would require focus on getting to the evidence and prosecuting the guilty, which are the founding principles of democratic justice. Voices in newspapers such as The Telegraph have raised questions about the manner in which Batla House was stormed. Such fissures within the media itself lend credibility to the charge that the tele-visual terrorist acts and state response increasingly becoming self-contained and mutually dependant events. The day after the storming of Batla house, images of officer Mohan Chand hours before his death and his bereaved family were played up. The actions of terrorists, and similar spectacle-based activities of media and security establishment, can be likened to pornography. That is, they are devoid of any intellectual meaning. After we are exposed to the first few minutes of human intimacy via sexual acts, we do not learn anything more. The aesthetic of pornography is founded on metronomic monotony and repetitiveness and lacks any intellectual depth. It is troubling that the NIA-UAPA bills were passed without any public debate or discourse. The ruling party and the opposition were in a hurry to pass the bills. Did the media play a role in consensus building for the passage of the bill? Absolutely?

News, Death, and Morality

It can be argued that media’s fascination with images that are troublesomely intimate, yet lack any meaning in themselves, point to encouragement of a voyeuristic reader. Terrorism is no longer an empirical fact, but has acquired an iconic, fetishised, and optical character. I had referred to our own culpability in the construction of terrorism as a "mean world" problem. The "War on Terror" frame, which was introduced by the world's only remaining hyper-power, USA, has now reached India. The intellectual bankruptcy in Indian news media was proven when it framed the issue as India's 9/11 demonstrating the power of communication, i.e., how the propaganda efforts of Bin Laden and the Bush administration have become a globalised phenomenon. We are absolutely at ease with this term. Isn't it instructive that over 300,000 civilians have died in Iraq since 2003 and we accept this without shock and horror. Here lies the rub of media in a liberal economic agenda that commodifies news and information. Without condoning acts of terror, we can ponder over some facts. For example, over 100,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the last decade. Yet it does not have the same "terrorising" effect as say the bombing of a train that kills a few hundred. Over 500 journalists covered the Lakme Fashion Week while there are only a few specialist journalists covering rural and development affairs. As argued by P Sainath:

In a country whose unemployment is simply stunning, the labour correspondent is extinct. 2006 was the worst year of farmer suicides. How many national media journalists were covering the agrarian crisis in Vidarbha? There were six. But there were 512 journalists covering the Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai.

(read more about these figures here)

I had earlier suggested that terrorism is 99 per cent a communicative act and 1 per cent actual violence. The illustrations I have provided so far are aimed at suggesting that news and our understanding of the world "out there" is not based on an unproblematic relaying of facts. That is, terror is no longer a verb, but has acquired the proportions of a noun. A highly complex interaction between media sociology, ideologies, the establishment, and the nature of the "here and now" media technologies that influence how we understand terror. Modern terror is not specifically new. The media presents us news in a highly simplified way, amplifying our own stereotypes and biases. Thus, the Somalian piracy crisis has been presented in the western and Indian media as one of lawlessness (with links to Islamic terrorism), which acquired hysterical proportions after the sinking of a pirate mother ship by an Indian frigate (link) while the crisis in Congo has been presented as an issue of ethnic rivalries in a backward African country (link). Both of these frames are wrong and we are deluding ourselves by believing them so.

Terrorism as long is driven and focused on individuals and groups (Bin Laden, Let) serves as a mimetic force with both sides elevating each other to justify their own existence. I particularly stress that I am not drawing a moral equivalence between Bin Laden and democratically elected leaders. But when democratic responses are driven by personalities, stereotypes, and oversimplification (for example axis of evil, you are with us or against us, India's 9/11) with no room for internal reflection we are met with internal contradiction. For example, even though we can safely label the the LeT founders as crackpots, they have and will continue to point at the Malegaon blasts, Gujarat 2002, Mumbai riots, and the systemic violence against Muslims in India as a recruiting tool to their cause. The question is whether these cases are authentic or not? The answer, from an honest, liberal, moral, and democratic perspective would be Yes. We can continue to build defences, try to fight against the bad guys, or fix our own shredded clothes through which our naked body is clearly visible.

(The author, Kishore Budha, holds a PhD in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds, UK and is a former print media journalist. He has also worked in the area of Web-based business intelligence tracking. He is currently based at the University of Leeds and blogs at Subaltern Media. He has published in the area of digital content and communities, journalism and ideology. His research specialism includes media philosophy, critical theory, informatics societies, media industry, journalism, communication technologies.)

Footnotes
1. Read a report based on Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan’s presidential address at the inaugural session of the international conference of jurists on “Terrorism, Rule of Law & Human Rights” in New Delhi on December 13, 2008. Link

2. "Mean World Beliefs" also have been termed "persecution beliefs" and refer generally to the belief akin to, "Others are out to get me." The idea here is simply that the world is a mean place. "Just world beliefs" involve the notion that the world is a just place -- that is, that individuals ultimately are punished for their wrongs, and/or that there exists a sort of fundamental fairness in human interaction.

3. Subjective violence is an act committed by one agent or body against other. Here the links and culpability are clear. Systemic violence on the other hand is the violence inherent in the system that goes on in the background that we know but do not recognise as being "violent". For example, the global capital system which can destroy economies, institutions, societies, families, and individuals, yet we do not register the same kind of horror we express towards subjective violence.

4. For more on media portrayal of good vs bad Muslims see this article (Link).

References

Alvi, Naziya (2008) ‘My brother, the bomber’ Hindustan Times Delhi, 21 Sep, P1

Chauhan, Neeraj (2008) ‘Linked to Lashkar, fan of Osama, Atif was part of 14 behind blasts: police’ Indian Express, Delhi Edition, 21 Sep, P1

Der Derian, James(2005) 'Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos', Third World Quarterly, 26:1, Pages 23 — 37

Garrison, Arthur H. (2004) 'Defining terrorism: philosophy of the bomb, propaganda by deed and change through fear and violence', Criminal Justice Studies, 17:3,259 — 279

Sanghvi, Vir (2008) ‘After the blasts’ Hindustan Times, Delhi Edition, Sep 21, P12

Sharan, Abhishek and Singh, Vijaita (2008a) ‘Who was Atif’ Hindustan Times Delhi, 20 Sep, P1

Sharan, Abhishek and Singh, Vijaita (2008b) ‘Nationwide terror network unravels’ Hindustan Times Delhi, 21 Sep, P1

Srivastava, Tushar (2008) ‘I’ll be back in an hour’ Hindustan Times Delhi, 20 Sep, P1

Stuhr J.J. (2004) "Old Ideals Crumble: War, Pragmatist Intellectuals, and the Limits of Philosophy", Metaphilosophy, Volume 35, Numbers 1-2, January, pp. 82-98(17)

Tripathi, Rahul (2008) ‘Lashkar support for IM-SIMI operation, explosives procured from Karnataka’ Times of India, Delhi 21 Sep, P2

Telegraph (2008) ‘Made-for-camera operation shows chinks Arrest bright spot amid goof-ups - Loss for life’ The Telegraph, Sep 21[online] here

Virilio P (1983) Pure War, trans by M Polizotti, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983

Using Tech Eyes To Spot Terrorists

2009-01-31T16:30:00.001+05:30

This article first appeared in the January 2009 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

The terror attacks in Mumbai have highlighted the need for better surveillance in our cities. Technology could play a major role here.

The terrorist strikes in Mumbai have exposed the vulnerability of our cities. It is essential that areas like hotels, train stations, bus stations, airports, markets and malls be provided with better surveillance to enable authorities to monitor and catch suspicious behaviour.

The Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) at Mumbai has over three million passengers passing through it every day. Most of these people, almost all of the time, perform normal activities like buying tickets, boarding and getting off trains, buying magazines, talking on mobile phones, and so on. Statistically, an abnormal event like the terrorist attack happens once in many millions of activities. But that does not lessen its impact or the need to spot it and nip it in the bud because, although rare, such an event can cause immeasurable damage to life and property.

Is it possible to add more ‘eyes’ to the city? Is it possible to use closed circuit television (CCTV) and other imaging technologies to catch terrorists before they strike? Is it possible to use machine vision technology to automatically detect abnormal activities in the images that have been captured and alert the police? Believe it or not, the answer to all these questions is ‘yes’, provided the right technology is in place.

An imaging and storage challenge

Each public place has its peculiarities. In some, it is easy to place CCTV equipment, especially indoors, where the cameras can be mounted on the walls. In others, like open markets and streets, it may be necessary to erect structures for placing the cameras.

Of course, this might need a large number of images. For instance, a place like CST has 18 platforms and many common areas. To cover each platform will require at least 30 cameras, and the common areas will require about 250 cameras. So, in all, CST will require about 800 cameras to cover it fully.

In open spaces like markets, tethered helium balloons, floating in the air, fitted with cameras can be used. One such balloon at a height of a few hundred metres fitted with multiple high-resolution cameras can cover the entire market very easily.

It is important to make sure that cameras can capture good quality images in different conditions like daylight, night light, cloudy or rainy situations, etc. The need is for imaging technology that has good resolutions under different imaging conditions, is inexpensive and is robust enough to be used outdoors and indoors.

Then there is the matter of storage. One hour of video from one camera can easily take up 30 GB (gigabyte) of storage space, so one would need to use image compression techniques to keep storage requirements at a minimum. However, the compression should not result in too much loss of clarity in the images, otherwise the very point of storing the images would be lost. What’s more, these image compression techniques need to be evaluated with CCTV images under different real life lighting and imaging conditions. Similarly, while a number of imaging technologies exist, it is still a challenge to determine the right solutions for camera placement and lighting.

The brain behind the eyes

Monitoring of CCTV images has traditionally been done by human observers, who often monitor multiple screens simultaneously. As the number of cameras increases, it will be necessary to increase the number of human observers as well. However, studies have shown that after the first 40 minutes, the alertness of the human observer falls drastically. Hence, automated solutions to recognise events that seem out of the ordinary, need to be developed.

Machine vision technology is maturing and today, a computer program can automatically detect stationary and non-stationary objects in an image. For example, people, luggage, trolleys, dustbins, kiosks and other objects in images can be automatically identified by a computer program. A computer program can even detect unattended luggage with reasonable accuracy—an important factor considering that bombs are often left in the form of luggage, transistors, etc. A computer can also detect when someone carries a suspicious-looking object. A human observer can be alerted to look at such images, verify that the system is correct, and notify security personnel on the ground.

It is possible to match the faces and gaits of people with those of known suspects, as well as identify suspicious behaviour like nervous or jerky movements by individuals, which can be indicative of a person who is about to carry out an attack.

It is essential that security experts work with the engineers writing such programs to define the scenarios of interest. The computer program needs to be given examples of normal events so that it can report anything that does not fit into this pattern.

Start-ups for security

But while security in public places needs to be stepped up, such security should not be disruptive. At CST, the authorities rejected a plan to frisk every person entering the premises—it was impractical to frisk over three million passengers every day. Security has to be effective but at the same time it should be unobtrusive as far as possible. Just placing guards at entrances or even frisking is not a solution in itself. We need to put technology to effective use and collect as much actionable data as possible to preempt terrorist strikes. ASSOCHAM expects that the security business in India will become a Rs 50,000 crore industry in the next four years. Much of this money will go into deploying technologies that can effectively fill the security gaps.

This represents an opportunity for technopreneurs to help make our lives safer. The first challenge is to reduce the cost of hardware. Today, a night vision camera costs Rs 10,000, while a camera for normal lighting costs Rs 5,000. These costs need to be brought down through innovative use of photo equipment and semiconductors. The next challenge is to develop better machine vision software. As it is not possible to monitor all images manually, machine vision algorithms for automatic surveillance need to be developed and deployed to aid the human observers. As in all matters these days, terrorism needs to be tackled by a blend of human effort and technology.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Padma Awards, Why So Few In Sciences?

2009-01-27T17:49:00.013+05:30

Padma Awards, namely, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri are given by the government of India for exceptional and distinguished service in various fields including science, medicine, arts, social service, literature, sports, etc. In 2009, one hundred and thirty three Padma Awards were given out.

It is interesting to see the distribution of the disciplines. Fifty percent of the awardees get it for excelling in Arts and Literature. Science and Technology and Medicine together account for only 23%. This is a disheartening statistic. Disheartening because the brightest kids enter the science stream in school and then go on to do engineering and medicine. But as the distribution of awards shows, this group of bright youngsters make only a small impact later in their lives.

Where do the bright youngsters entering the IITs, AIIMS and other engineering and medical colleges disappear. Why do they have so little impact on the Indian society? Do they go on to work in areas of little relevance to the Indian society? Or is it a case that our society does not recognize their contributions?

Do visit this site to see even better statistics. Interestingly the 2009 trend holds through the history of the Padma Awards.

Innovation to Drive the Economy

2009-01-25T23:33:00.002+05:30

Today India’s share of the world GDP is a minuscule 2%. The US accounts for over a quarter of the world GDP. Less than 200 years ago the situation was almost the reverse. In 1820, the US accounted for less than 2% of the world GDP and India had a 16% share and China 33%. In a previous post I asked for your reasons for this. Here I will offer what I think are the reasons.

In these two hundred years the drivers of the world economies have changed. In 1820 the economies were driven by agriculture and trade. Today the world economies are driven by knowledge - Knowledge about efficient ways to manufacture new goods, knowledge about efficient distribution of services, knowledge about effective ways to utilize existing knowledge.

Where did we here in India lose the plot in the last 200 years to drop down to where we are today? There is little doubt that the US economy rose because it lead the world in the creation, dissemination and utilization of knowledge. During the same period we didn’t devote any energy to the creation of new knowledge or intellectual property.

Innovation as driver of the knowledge economy

The World Bank Institute offers a formal definition of a knowledge economy as one that creates, disseminates, and uses knowledge to enhance its growth and development. For sometime now it has been claimed that India is at the forefront of this new knowledge driven world.

While it is true that we have the ingredients to become a leading knowledge economy, we are still not marshaling our resources properly to achieve this. We have one of the largest pool of technical manpower in the world with our universities producing over half a million engineering, mathematics and science graduates every year. We have a vibrant entrepreneurial and business community. But in spite of all this we are not a net producer of knowledge. Most of our companies including those in the software sector consume ideas generated outside of India. The business model of our companies does not include generation of new ideas. As a result we continue to be a net user of intellectual property.

Knowledge statistics

A good indicator of the amount of intellectual property being generated in a country is the number of patent filings. A patent is an exclusive right granted on an idea to its inventor. Such a right is granted to the inventor if her idea is found to be novel. The sole criterion for the grant of a patent is the newness of the idea being claimed.

In 2006-2007 the total number of patents filed in India was 28,882. In China during the same period more than 210,501 patent applications were filed. In the US, over 425,996 patents were filed during the same period.

What is even more alarming is that of the 28,882 patents filed in India, only 5,314 of these patents originated in India. The majority (19,768) originated abroad with 6,995 originating from the US.

In Asia Pacific, India has one of the oldest established Intellectual Property systems with the first patent laws being enacted in 1856. However, India has always been a net user of intellectual property rather than a creator. In recent times the government and other institutions have been recognizing the importance of intellectual property as a major source of economic and technological development. But as the numbers show, we haven’t been able to encourage the generation of new ideas in our country.

Companies for knowledge creation

While we lead the world economy in 1820 due to our leadership in agriculture, today we buy genetically modified seeds from the US to increase our crop yield per hectare. While we lead the world in trade, today we do not understand the mechanics of world trade enough to even influence the prices of agricultural commodities of which we are the lead producers. So we did not even build on our strengths.

A look at any of the leading companies of the world will make it clear that a game changing company like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others, changes the world on the strength of valuable ideas. A company needs to generate ideas and then build products and services based on them. An informal survey of Indian companies showed that less than 5% of them have based their business on intellectual properly created by them. This is an alarming statistic. It shows that there is a dearth of ideas. Without a good idea no matter how well you do the marketing, a company is unlikely to become a world leader.

By definition the knowledge economy needs good ideas to drive it. With the large technical manpower available in our country, we now need to give the right impetus to get new and valuable ideas flowing.

Who Owns The Knowledge in India?

2009-01-23T14:12:00.014+05:30

India has always been a net consumer of intellectual property. Now slowly Indian companies are beginning to give importance to the creation of knowledge and its utilization. I will dwell on two outstanding examples from the recent past: Nano and Chandrayaan. But before that let me give some numbers.

The Council for Industrial and Scientific Research (CSIR) is the top producer of Intellectual Property in India. Over the past 40 years CSIR has filed over 3000 patents. CSIR employs about 10,000 scientists across 45 labs in India. Many of them hold PhD degrees from the top educational institutions in India.

Top Indian Patent Filing Companies/Organizations, 1968-2004

Applicant	No of Patents
CSIR	3083
HLL	946
Hoechst	766
Siemens	685
Westinghouse Electric Corp	477
Union Carbide	365
Proctor & Gamble	337
Riter AG Maschif	336
Lucas Ind Plc	326
ICI Plc	308

Every year till 2005 CSIR filed the maximum number of patent applications in the Indian Patent office. However, in 2006 that changed. Microsoft emerged out of nowhere to become the top applicant of Indian patents in 2006.

Top ten Indian patent applicants in 2006

Applicant	No of Patents
Microsoft Corp	584
CSIR	476
Johnson & Johnson	271
Qualcomm Inc	249
Honda Motor Co Ltd	237
Samsung Electronics	216
Konink Philips Electric	194
Thomson Licensing SA	157
Hindustan Lever Ltd	146
Motorola Inc	145

In 2006 there were 28,882 patents filed in India. Of these only 5,314 patents originated in India. The majority (19,768) originated abroad with 6,955 patent applications originating in the US.

Patent Filings in India by Country of Origin in 2006

While it is great that CSIR owns a large number of Indian patents, we must realize that they do not go and commercialize their ideas. So in effect these patents largely remain ideas in their scientists' head.

Contrast this with Tata Motors. In the process of making Nano, Tata Motors filed just 34 patents. This is a minuscule number by any standards. But can you imagine the immense value this one car is bringing to Tata Motors and to India? Tata used not only its own 34 patented components but also existing patented components from other car companies to put together an innovative car in ways thought impossible before.

Chandrayaan was a grand success. Again in its creation a lot of intellectual property was created by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) scientists. I am not sure ISRO chose to patent these ideas. However, it is clear that lots of new ideas were generated in achieving the moon mission.

The World Bank Institute offers a formal definition of a knowledge economy as one that creates, disseminates, and uses knowledge to enhance its growth and development. For sometime now it has been claimed that India is at the forefront of this new knowledge driven world. But the truth is we are still not there.

We have to create a culture of innovation. To do that we have to encourage innovation. We have to learn how to identify innovation and we have to learn how to reward it. We have been flaunting the low cost of our moon mission. But the truth is that has been achieved by underpaying the scientists who made the mission possible. Very few of the components used in the mission were bought off the shelf. Most of them were unique and innovative components that the ISRO scientists created. So in effect the intellectual property cost of the mission was kept artificially low by underpaying for the innovations.

While it is true that we have the ingredients to become a leading knowledge economy, we are still not marshaling our resources properly to achieve this. We have one of the largest pool of technical manpower in the world with our universities producing over half a million engineering, mathematics and science graduates every year. We have a vibrant entrepreneurial and business community. We have a large Indian Diaspora working in high technology in the US and other western nations. But in spite of all this we continue to be a net user of intellectual property. We need to change that quickly.

Who Owns the Knowledge In This World?

2009-01-14T15:20:00.008+05:30

In the last post many readers gave their opinions on why there has been a shift in economic power from Asia in 1800's to USA in recent years. The US accounts for over 25% of the world GDP. Today India’s share of the world GDP is a minuscule 2%. Less than 200 years ago the situation was almost the reverse. The US accounted for less than 2% of the world GDP and India had a 16% share and China 33%, in 1820. In this post I will dwell on how invention and the creation of new knowledge has facilitated the rise of US.

Today the world is driven by knowledge - its creation, dissemination, and utilization to enhance growth and development. Countries that are able to produce knowledge and consume it effectively have been at the forefront in this century.

A good indicator of the amount of knowledge or intellectual property being generated in a country is the number of patent filings. A patent is an exclusive right granted on an idea to its inventor. Such a right is granted to the inventor if her idea is found to be novel. The sole criterion for the grant of a patent is the newness of the idea being claimed.

Today there are close to 6.3 million patents in force. Of these the majority of the patents are owned by applicants from USA, Japan and other European nations. Patents normally have a lifetime of 20 years.

Patents in Force by Country of Origin in 2006

In 2006-2007 the total number of patents filed in India was 28,882. In China during the same period more than 573,000 patent applications were filed. In the US, over 1,760,000 patents were filed during the same period. The total patent filings all over the world were 1,760,000. Effectively 1/4th of all patents filed were in the US.

Patent Filings in 2006 by Country of Filing

What is alarming for India is that of the 28,882 patents filed in India, only 5,314 of these patents originated in India. The majority (19,768) originated abroad with 6,955 patent applications originating in the US. Infact applicants from US and Japan account for over half the patents filed across the world. These countries and their institutions are major exporters of knowledge.

Patent Filings in 2006 by Country of Origin

Countries like US, Japan, Germany, France, have been net exporters of knowledge. They have also been effective in monetizing this knowledge that they create. The products and services based on their inventions allows their companies to stay ahead. However, India has always been a net user of intellectual property rather than a creator.

In recent times governments have been recognizing the importance of intellectual property as a major source of economic and technological development. Some countries like China have made great strides in turning themselves into net creators of knowledge. Others like India are still lagging behind.

Technology As A Driver of Modern Civilization

2009-01-05T17:38:00.011+05:30

The Gross Domestic Product of a country is a measure of its prosperity in terms of the goods and services produced by it. In 2007 the world GDP was estimated at $ 54.62 Trillion. The US contributed over 25% to the world GDP in 2007. The emerging economies of India and China contributed 2% and 6% respectively.

But what is interesting is that in 1820 China accounted for 33% and India for 16% of the world economy. USA's contribution then was a minuscule 2%.

World GDP Break Up in 1820

World GDP Break Up in 2007

If you look at the European nations their GDP has remained almost constant as a share of the world GDP. Similarly others have remained fairly constant with the exception of Japan.

What contributed to the rise of USA and the fall of India and China. What has resulted in this shift of economic power from Asia to the USA in these 200 years?

In 1820s the world economy was mostly agrarian. Indian and Chinese economies then were mostly driven by farming.

In 2008 the world economy is powered by technology. The US is at the forefront of a lot of the technological progress made by humankind.

What do you think are the reasons for this major change from 1820 to today?

Mathematical Modelling in Finance, Sports, ....

2008-12-31T00:01:00.000+05:30

This article first appeared in the December 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

Would the current financial crisis have occurred if objective, number-crunching machines had been taking decisions rather than human beings driven by intuition and instinct? Perhaps, it's time we took a closer look at the potential of mathematical modelling.

It may sound like something out of a school textbook, but mathematical modelling is taking the world by storm, albeit without too much fuss.

In basketball, baseball and many popular sports, suggested player salaries are arrived at using mathematical modelling.

Banks in India and abroad often use mathematical risk modelling to determine whether or not to give you the home loan you are seeking. Even Google uses mathematical models to determine auction bids on keywords. The examples don't end there -- today mathematical models are used in diverse areas.

The rise of mathematical modelling

Mathematicians have had tools in their arsenal to perform predictive modelling since the nineteenth century. But the recent adoption of mathematical modelling in the other diverse areas is the result of society's familiarity with computers and an acceptance of the fact that computers are indeed better at crunching large numbers than humans. Today people are willing to let computer programs manage their funds, but would they have been open to the idea 10 years ago, even though a computer, Deep Blue, had beaten the reigning chess champion, Gary Kasparov?

So how do these models work? In chess, given the current board position, the computer tries to make a move that will give it an advantage over the opponent. This means the computer program has to calculate all possible board positions and select the best move based on a prediction of the outcome of the game, given that move.

To predict a stock's price or a player's salary, the mathematical models used can be explained as predicting future trends based on the past scores. So a player who has consistently scored runs in the recent past would get a better price. Older scores would be damped by an appropriate scaling factor so that recent playing ability is given more weight in determining the salary. Criteria like popularity can also be factored in, based on measurements of number of mentions in blogs, news articles, etc.

Similarly, banks decide on your home loan application by predicting your repaying capacity based on current and past salaries, employment history, educational qualifications, credit history, etc. In addition to your own potential, they also model the future health of real estate markets. The model can include as many parameters as necessary and can keep evolving over time.

Why models succeed

In the 20-match world chess championship held in 1995, Vishwanathan Anand scored the first full point in the ninth match, but went on to lose against Kasparov because of the latter's intimidating tactics. Kasparov declared after the match that Anand was good at chess but was not psychologically up to the task of playing him. Interestingly, folklore has it that Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997 because he couldn't stare it down. Today, it is debatable whether a computer program can beat Anand. But chess computer programs can, without doubt, play almost as well as a chess grandmaster (there are only about a 1000 grandmasters today). Deep Blue could evaluate 200,000,000 chess positions in a second. In the recently concluded world chess championship, Kramnik got into time trouble in the matches he lost against Anand precisely because he was trying to optimise his next move by trying to calculate all possibilities in his head. Deep Blue definitely wouldn't have had any such trouble.

Most chess players have an excellent memory. A player like Anand remembers thousands of chess moves. But even Anand cannot remember more moves than a computer. So though a computer may be far less intelligent than even a five-year-old child, given its number crunching abilities and enormous memory, it can give a good fight and often win against an accomplished chess grandmaster. Remember, Deep Blue didn't have much chess knowledge. It was built by a team of five computer science researchers and one international chess master, who otherwise would have been no match for Kasparov.

A program that tracks stock prices can often do much better than a human being, as it can track huge amounts of data. For example, a computer program tracking shipping stocks can keep track of quarterly reports, weather conditions and pirate movements from news articles, offshore oil drilling trends, and a host of other factors that even a large group of human analysts cannot. In stock markets, speed is crucial. Based on the evaluation of a given set of parameters, a computer program can make split second decisions that may take hours or days for human analysts.

A major weakness of computer programs is that they do not have intuition or feeling. But this is also their strength. Would the financial crisis enveloping the US have come about if computer programs had decided whom to give housing loans to? Would derivative pricing based on mathematical modelling have warned us of the impending sub prime crisis?

The current economic slump has shown the need for better mathematical modelling of the financial markets. Even the last IPL biddings were driven to a large extent by sentiment. For example, Andrew Symonds earned a premium for the bad press he had generated during the preceding India tour of Australia. In hindsight, it turns out the franchisees overpaid for a lot of the players they bought. They would have been better off doing the bidding on a more objective, mathematical basis.

There is a distinct need for practical and usable mathematical predictive models in various fields. From sports to banking, such models can aid in better decision-making and importantly, there is realisation of this fact. As the Big Blue team showed, such models can be developed by small teams comprising people who are good at mathematics, programming and have an understanding of the domain for which the model is being built. As most science and engineering graduates will probably tell us, coming up with such models is not rocket science. With Chandrayaan successfully placed in the moon's orbit, perhaps they can now get down to solving this problem.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

The Security Threat of Chinese Phones

2008-12-27T10:14:00.005+05:30

Chinese phones pose a security threat because they do not carry a unique identifier code required by law.

Every GSM phone by law should carry a unique IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number that identifies it. Similarly every CDMA phone is identified by an equivalent ESN (Electronic Security Number).

When you lose your mobile phone you can report this number to the mobile service providers and they can render the phone useless by blocking the particular IMEI code unique to your phone.

During terrorist strikes of the kind in Mumbai, it would have been possible to identify and locate a terrorist's mobile phone using this code and triangulation.

If the terrorist changes his SIM frequently on a particular mobile then the IMEI on the phone will alert the security agencies. If the terrorist changes his phone along with the SIM frequently then triangulation will alert the agencies about the particular location where this is taking place.

Recently India has been flooded with Chinese phones which do not carry IMEI numbers. At the cell towers these phones show up as a string of zeros. The Indian government is contemplating banning these phones. Many of the recent terrorist bombs placed in the city used Chinese phones as trigger devices. These phones seem to have grown in popularity with the terrorists.

However, these phones are also popular with consumers because of their low cost. It is estimated that some 25 million Chinese phones are in use in India. The government is grappling with the option of banning these phones. But this would mean that innocent consumers who own these phones will suddenly find them useless.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Outsourced Brains

2008-12-24T13:14:00.007+05:30

Do you know how many technology graduates pass out of the engineering colleges in India every year? Well its close to half a million. Today we are all very proud of our techie community. We have some of the best programming brains in the world. And we have some of the largest IT services companies in the world.

But what is the portfolio of these IT companies? What are the techie brains in these companies working on? It turns out that at least 80% are working on problems outsourced from companies abroad. What that means is that we do not allocate even a small percentage of our thinking to tackle issues of relevance to India.

Perhaps that is why our security infrastructure is pathetically inadequate. Maybe that is why we could not even trace the mobile signals of the terrorists who were using their Blackberry's and high end mobile phones inside the hotel during the attack. Maybe that is why all we could do was to watch CCTV footage after the carnage had taken place at Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus. We did not have systems in place to start automated response sequences based on real time happenings. Maybe that is why we didnt have a sonar and radar net around our coasts to track enemy vessels.

There are technology solutions possible to fight terrorism. It is possible to track terrorists using the signals from their mobile phones. Terrorists today use Satellite phones, Blackberry's, internet, GPS systems, etc. It is possible to secure our coasts using radar and sonar technology. We have to learn to be more technology savvy than the terrorists. The politicians dont know what technology solutions are possible. They think like lay people and would buy more and more guns. But as we saw in Mumbai, if you have to use the guns you have already lost half the battle. It is up to the techie community to come forward with solutions and raise awareness. Otherwise the politicians will take their kickbacks and buy us irrelevant solutions from abroad, from the same companies that outsourced their work to us in the first place.

In the 70s, 80s and 90s Indian techies went abroad and worked there. In the past ten years they have stayed back but have been working on the outsourced problems. But in the next ten years let us concentrate on working on local Indian problems. That is when we will see the real benefits of IT.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Coastal Command Structure

2008-12-15T23:22:00.005+05:30

The Home Minister P Chidambaram announced in parliament that India will be setting up a new Coastal Command to secure our coastline. India's coastline is over 7500 kilometers long. The recent terror attacks in Mumbai started with the terrorists arriving from the sea. Many of our strategic landmarks like oil refineries, nuclear power plants, heritage spots and tourist places, are located close to the sea. We must ensure that this route cannot be used by our enemies to launch a strike against us.

Tiered security system

India has a three-tier coastal security system. Marine police guard the waters up to 12 nautical miles from the coastline, then the Coast Guards look after the sea between 12 and 200 nautical miles and the high seas beyond 200 nautical miles are guarded by the Navy.

In 2005 the government had proposed a coastal security scheme and allocated Rs. 400 crores to it. Most of this money went into setting up new marine police stations and buying boats for the marine police and the coast guards.

Today all our maritime agencies put together dont have a total of even 500 cruiser boats. But with a coastline of over 7500 kilometers even 7500 boats would not be enough to secure it completely. We must realize that surveillance need not be physical. In fact it should not be. Physical security has holes and we cannot afford holes in the security system.

Also very importantly it is necessary to have a single line of command. We lost too much time after the terrorists hit Mumbai. Our security agencies got activated very late.

supplied by FreeFoto.com

Casting a security net: Plugging security holes

We need to put the whole command and intelligence structure under a single point of control. Physical surveillance must be buttressed with a security system that includes the use of satellite imaging, sonar and radar. Such a security structure will give a view of ships over water and underwater. Such a security system will allow our agencies to see farther and wider than any physical surveillance system alone.

Objects many nautical miles away can be detected using a sonar. Sonar uses sound waves underwater to detect man made objects like, ships, submarines, mines, autonomous underwater vehicles, etc. An officer sitting in the command center in Delhi can monitor what is going on in the Indian ocean and direct the coast guard to locations where suspicious activity is detected. So far the Navy has concentrated on detecting large battle class vessels because the perceived threat was from foreign navies. However, now that the war is being waged through covert means, sonar technology has to be evolved to detect smaller vessels in the sea. Radar and satellite imaging need to be combined with sonar surveillance to trace the path of ships and other smaller sea vessels. Using these technologies an impregnable security net needs to be woven around our coasts.

We must also put a Sea Traffic Control structure in place. This can be modeled along the lines of an air traffic control system. Every sea vessel should be identifiable by the sea traffic control using active or passive tags and these tags should be used to track them.

Salient features of coastal command

Sea Traffic Control: Identification of sea vessels based on active and/or passive tagging - sea vessels are recognized and directed using a control mechanism similar air traffic control
Electronic Surveillance Net: Monitoring and intelligence gathering using sonar, radar and satellite imaging. We must cast an electronic net around our coasts
Physical Monitoring: Agencies including marine police, coast guard, navy using high speed boats, ships and aircraft carriers
Single Line of Command: Inputs from all of the above need to be analysed by a single nodal point and action taken on them

We have to take action. We have to put systems in place. Importantly our policy makers need to realize that a command structure cannot be bought over the shelf, neither can it be copied from other countries. In fact no country today has an advanced coastal command system like this in place, because they don't need it. We need it so lets build it. To do this effectively we have to involve our security agencies, scientific institutions and policy makers to build a structure that fits our needs.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Pinpointing Terrorist Location Using Their Mobile Phone

2008-12-14T00:01:00.004+05:30

Do you know that at any given time your mobile service provider knows where you are? Whether you are in your home or some remote location, your phone gives away your location. If you have been moving throughout the day, the service provider knows where all you went and at what times. If you travel to New York from Mumbai then the mobile service provider in New York knows that you are a visitor to its network and are originally from Mumbai. Within the city too the service provider can locate you with reasonable accuracy.

Using cell towers to locate a mobile

In any city, a mobile service provider like Airtel has many mobile phone towers. When a user makes a phone call using a mobile phone, the phone connects to the nearest towers. But even when the phone is not in use, the phone keeps contact with the towers in the vicinity.

By using signals from at least three of the nearest towers it is possible to locate a mobile phone almost exactly. Using this method called triangulation it is possible to locate every mobile phone that is currently on the network. Mobile phone companies often use this location and movement information to plan tower locations, roaming schemes, tariffs and for location based advertising.

Terrorists depend on mobiles, lets catch them using it

Terrorists come armed with AK series rifles but even deadlier than that they are getting techno savvy. They carry sat phones, Blackberry's, GPS and know how to use these communication devices to their advantage. In the Mumbai terror attacks, among other things they are believed to have browsed the internet for media reports to plan their next move inside the hotels they targeted.

How did you feel when the Mehrauli bombers in Delhi dropped a bomb in the crowded market and then got away on their motorbikes? Shouldnt they have been caught easily? Most likely they would have been carrying mobile phones in their pockets.

A mobile phone or other communication device is an indispensable tool for a terrorist. They have to synchronize with each other and get intelligence inputs from their group members over phone. But each user of a communication device leaves behind a digital signature that can be used to trace his path. We need to learn how to read this effectively. In the Mehrauli bombing, it would have been possible to immediately locate all mobile phones in that area that started moving away from the epicenter of the blast. It would have been possible to track each and every mobile phone and this data would have been valuable for the police. Instead of blindly putting up road blocks all over the city, this would have effectively pinpointed the terrorists and the police could have gone on hot pursuit.

Similarly in the Mumbai terrorist strike, such intelligence would have helped the commandos in targeting the terrorists better.

It is time we learnt to use technology better than the terrorists. Fighting terrorism isnt about having more policemen with AK rifles. It is about giving the police force good quality, actionable intelligence. Intelligence that allows them to narrow down on the terrorists with accuracy.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Dosvidaniya And Put Me On The Front Page

2008-12-13T00:01:00.016+05:30

Do Svidaniya is Russian for good bye. I know many people who after watching the movie Dasvidaniya have been thinking of their list of ten-things-to-do-before-dying. For the protagonist of the movie one among the ten things was to have his photograph appear on the front page of a national newspaper.

Terrorists on front page

The terrorists have continuously been on the front page of every national newspaper. I think by now their images are imprinted in our minds. There are stories about their childhood, their families, their likes and dislikes. Probably one of their ten wishes was to have their photograph appear on the front page of newspapers. And this wish is now fulfilled many times over. But I dont care what they wished. By splashing their pictures and stories on the front page everyday, the media has unwittingly made them look like icons of some eerie popular culture.

No room for the real heroes?

Vishnu Zende, the railways employee saved many lives with repeated announcements and instructions on the public address systemthe night terrorists hit Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus. The terrorists realized that people were escaping and were desperate to kill him and spent a lot of time trying to locate the announcement booth from which he was frantically giving directions to the people. They did locate the booth he was in and shot at him but luckily he lived. But many brave policemen and commandos lost their lives in the operations to flush out the terrorists that night - Hemant Karkare, Vijay Salaskar, Ashok Kamte, Sandeep Unnikrishnan, Gajendra Singh, Shashank Shinde, Arun Chitte, Rahul Shinde, Jaywant Patil, Yogesh Patil, Ambadas Pawar, M. Chowdhury, Mukesh Jadhav, Tukaram Omble, Prakash More, Bapusahab Darugude...... I want to know more about the real heroes. I want to know what made them put their own lives in the line of fire to save others. I want to know about their parents, their wives and children. I want to see them on the front page everyday.

O! the people of my motherland, don't forget the sacrifice of our heroes

O! the people of my motherland!
Shed a few tears,
For those who martyred,
Remember their great sacrifice!

- Aye Mere Watan Ke Logo sung by Lata Mangeshkar on 26 January 1963, written by Kavi Pradeep and composed by C. Ramachandra

[I request you to help me fill the wikipedia profiles of all those who died fighting or helping others]

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Sorry

2008-12-12T11:33:00.004+05:30

"On behalf of the government, I would like to apologise to our people for the fact that these dastardly acts could not be prevented." said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Parliament during the discussion on the Mumbai terror attacks.

"We could not protect them. I sincerely apologise," Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said to the citizens of thirteen countries who died in the Mumbai terror attacks.

Sixty hours that stunned us. Hours that made us proud of our police forces, armed forces, NSG commandos, but also hours that made us realize our helplessness.

The lasting image from the Mumbai terror attacks was for me a poor labourer whose brother had died, killed by the terrorists at Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus within the first few hours. As the reporter thrust a microphone and camera on his face, looking for a sound byte, he had nothing to say. The reporter was probably more used to glib politicians and kept prodding him to say something. He finally said "what can I say, punish them." His face said so much more, it had many many more emotions. He had anger, helplessness, sorrow, sadness, determination, and so many emotions which I probably will never understand in a lifetime, or maybe I will. At that moment he personified India.

The land where the Ganga flows, Jis desh mein ganga behti hai

“Where truth lives on the lips and honesty in the heart,
We are dwellers in that land,
That land where the Ganga flows!

“Where a guest is held to be dearer than one’s own life,
We dont greed for more and value the little that we have
We come from the motherland that nurtures her children
A motherland that from ages has borne the brunt for them
We are dwellers in that land,
That land where the Ganga flows!

“Some people who have all the knowledge show no understanding of fellow human beings
This is the east and we understand the value of each life
We live together in peace and amity
We realize that love is all that remains when all else is gone
We are the dwellers of that land,
That land where the Ganga flows!"

This song is from the 1960 movie Jis desh mein Ganga behti hai. Ofcourse in Hindi the words are much more powerful than the translation given above.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Using Machine Vision For Catching Terrorists

2008-12-09T15:30:00.008+05:30

Hotels, train stations, bus stations, airports, markets, malls, all need to be secured with better surveillance. It is important to monitor and catch suspicious behaviour early so that major tragedies are averted. Today it is possible to do this automatically using machine vision technology.

Statistically an abnormal event like a terrorist planting a bomb at the Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) happens very rarely. But it is still very important to catch such rare events to stop them early because they have the potential to disrupt normal life and cause damage to life and property.

We need to add more eyes at CST and other public places to protect them. With machine vision technology it is possible to keep tabs and pin point any abnormal activities.

CST has eighteen platforms and other areas with easy access to the public. To cover all of them would require at least 700 cameras. Closed circuit television (CCTV) technology would allow the images captured by these cameras to be viewed on TV screens in a central monitoring room.

Monitoring of the CCTV images has traditionally been done by human observers who often view multiple screens simultaneously. As the number of cameras increases it is necessary to increase the number of human observers. Studies have shown that after the first forty minutes the alertness of the human observer falls drastically. It is clear that employing humans to stare at TV screens may not be the right solution. It is necessary to aid them with machine vision software that alerts them of suspicious behaviour.

Machine vision for automatic detection of abnormal activities

Machine vision technology is maturing and today a computer program can automatically detect stationary and non-stationary objects in an image. For example, people, luggage, trolleys, dustbins, kiosks and other objects in the images can be automatically identified by a computer program. Computer programs can also classify different forms of human activity like buying tickets, pushing a luggage trolley, talking on a mobile phone, etc. The computer program needs to be given examples of normal events so that it can report anything that does not fit into this group of defined normal activities. Abnormal activities could include someone leaving behind a piece of luggage - often bombs are left behind in the form of luggage. A computer can also detect when someone carries a "suspicious" looking object. The human observer can be alerted to look at such images, verify that the system is correct and notify security personnel on the ground. In this way the computer program can aid the human observer in pin pointing abnormal events.

It is possible to do face recognition and gait analysis to match known suspects. It is also possible to catch suspicious behaviour like nervous or jerky movements by individuals which can be indicative of a person who is about to carry out an attack.

In the recent terror attack at CST a system like this would have alerted security personnel as soon as someone with a gun was "seen" entering the platform. The system would have recognized this as an abnormal event and a preset response chain could have been activated.

Professors and students at institutions like IITs have been working on developing machine vision technology for many years now. We must show strong will and utilize our technology skills to ensure that terrorists cannot strike us again.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Mining Telecom Graphs To Catch Terrorists

2008-12-08T12:25:00.012+05:30

Housewives typically make more calls during late mornings, early afternoons and evenings. Office executives make more calls during morning and evening hours while on their daily commute. Teenagers make more calls in the evenings. Weekday and weekend behaviour of most users differs drastically.

Students and people in their early twenties place a lot of calls for food delivery. Most calls to home shopping networks during the day are from retired people.

Telecom graphs

Among billions of cell phone users the number of terrorists using the network is very small. In statistical terms they are outliers. But the calling patterns of the terrorists are also expected to be unique and different from ordinary users. Some known traits of terrorists include frequent changing of SIM cards, short conversations, and so on. Often terrorists make short hop calls through numerous handler agents to give their message, usually to someone in another part of the globe.

Telecom companies are beginning to exploit telecom graphs or ‘Who’s calling who’ graphs of millions of users, to plan their marketing schemes. Let's say you make an average of 25 calls per day. Some of these are to people you call regularly. Telecom companies analyse your calling behaviour, and that of your group, to decide marketing schemes best suited to your group.

Social behaviour analysis

Can telecom graphs help nab terrorists? Given the telecom graphs and calling patterns of all cell phone users, is it possible to tag certain behaviour as being that of a terrorist. Many scientists believe this is possible. Today most online users are part of social network groups. Large studies have been performed using such social network data on human social behaviour including aspects of social psychology and group organizational structures. The findings of these studies have shown interesting characteristics of social behaviour.

If telecom companies can learn enough about customer preferences then it should be possible to find specific patterns that identify terrorists too.

Cell phone records have often helped in nabbing terrorists after they have committed the crime. This was done in the Spain bombings and also in the recent Mumbai terror attacks. However, it is important to stop terror events before they happen. That is only possible if we can find specific patterns that alert us about a possible terrorist before he commits heinous acts.

Ofcourse, such analysis can raise privacy concerns. But remember most companies like Google and Facebook are already doing it to serve you relevant advertisements. Usually the data is anonymyzed first and then analyzed by computer programs with minimal human intervention.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Technology: Problems and Prospects

2008-11-30T07:04:00.010+05:30

In my first guest post ever, I (NotedScholar) will discuss a couple pros and cons of technology in contemporary society.

The Epistemic Sacrifice

The influential intellectual Edward Said makes this poignant observation, following the thought of the postmodernist Erich Auerbach:

After [WWII], Auerbach notes mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and greater and greater specialization of knowledge, gradually narrowed the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlasting inquiring kind of philological work that he had represented, and, alas, it's an even more depressing fact that, since Auerbach's death in 1957, both the idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk in scope as well as in centrality. The book culture based on archival research as well as general principles of mind that once sustained humanism as a historical discipline have almost disappeared. Instead of reading in the real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the internet and in the mass media [Orientalism, pg. xxvi, emphasis mine].

This is an excellent encapsulation of one of the disadvantages of what the prophetic futurist Jacques Ellul scornfully called "the technological age." I call this the Great Epistemic Sacrifice. Such innovations as the Open Source movement and the Wiki products have - almost literally - transplanted society's brain, its store of knowledge. What matters now is not the archival knowledge of Said, but the access to knowledge. For example, we no longer need to know who Vicky Crawford works for, or how lumberjack's harvest trees. Instead, we can just - and here is the operative imperative of the new generation - "look it up."

This sacrifice to progress is perhaps an unintended cause of the educational lapse of the West, predicted by men such as Oswald Spengler, but described today by public polling.

The Emergent Divinity of Wikipedia

But there are also great benefits of technology. One good example is the deification of the Internet. Wikipedia has shown us that it is possible to approach omniscience and omnipresence via the Worldwide Web. Perhaps we will never get there - mankind's progress will be like the asymptote that never reaches the axis of penultimate knowledge (omniscience) and spatiality (omnipresence). But we can nevertheless approach it indefinitely. And is this not something properly called God?

The emergent properties of Wikipedia are nearly identical to classical theistic definitions, a la carte Richard Swinburne, the Nolloth Professor of Theistic Philosophy at Oxford, Emeritus. Some will say that this is a downside, and not a benefit. They will say that the victory of technology constitutes idolatry, that man can go too far. But they are advocating for a slave morality, and the future is not theirs.

Alright, that's it for now. It's been pleasant guest-posting.

Yours,
NS
Science and Math Defeated

An Eye In the Sky to Track Terrorists

2008-11-29T18:21:00.017+05:30

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has had great success in launching satellites. Chandrayaan the new moon's satellite is also a resounding success. But after the recent Mumbai terror attacks it is now time to think about using the satellite technology to keep an "eye" on Indian cities. We need to track each and every movement that terrorists make. We cannot allow terrorists to lob bombs and get away on a motorbike. We cannot allow terrorists to hijack police cars and run amok with their AK 47 rifles.

Satellite imaging

Recently ISRO launched Bhuvan that is capable of taking high resolution pictures from its vantage point in the sky. Bhuvan infact has such high resolution that it can see cars and buses. It has a resolution of 10 meters against Wikimapia's 50 m and Google earth's 200 m.

But does it mean we can track the movement of a terrorist using this? Say the case of the Delhi terrorists in 2008 who dropped a bomb from a motorbike into a crowded market, can we track where they are going. Well no we cannot do that using a single Bhuvan because it is in low earth orbit. Satellites in low earth orbit return to the same spot over the earth only once in 12-18 days. On the other hand, geostationary satellites remain fixed at a point, so for example, you don't have to move your Tata Sky or Dish Tv to point in different directions at different times. However, the height of a geostationary satellite is extremely high, over 35,000 kms over earth compared to low earth imaging satellites, like Bhuvan, that are just around 800 kms from earth.

In order to track Mumbai or Delhi one would require a system of 16 Bhuvan satellites. It is definitely doable but such imaging needs to be supported by other forms of imaging. For example, during bad weather visual images will be hard to get from such a satellite.

Airborne imaging

Simple tethered helium balloons fitted with cameras can be used for imaging public markets. One such balloon at a height of a few hundred meters fitted with high resolution cameras can cover one market very easily.

High resolution images from these can be transmitted using radio waves to a ground station where they can be processed.

Brain behind the eye

Image processing technology today exists to automatically process images to identify out of the ordinary behaviour. Professors and students at IITs routinely work on developing machine vision software for various applications. Many of them already have technology that can be tweaked to work on images from satellites and helium balloon cameras. Combined with human trackers such technology can be of immense help. For example, such software can easily track and identify when someone leaves a bag (or bomb) behind. The human tracker can be alerted to look at this image, verify that the system is correct and notify policemen on the ground.

Today our scientists are capable of giving us an eye in the sky. They are also capable of putting a brain behind that eye. A brain that can alert us every time something untoward happens. We need to channel our anger. We need to use our intellectual prowess to make sure that we protect ourselves against terrorists.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Securing Our Coasts Against Terrorists and Enemies

2008-11-29T11:10:00.011+05:30

The Mumbai terrorists arrived over the sea. With a total countrywide coastline of over 7500 kilometers, it is a huge task to secure this route against terrorists and enemies. Coastgaurd, navy, army and air force constantly guard us against intrusions. The technology used comprises of high-technology radar and sonar systems.

Keeping the coast clear

There is both underwater and over water surveillance. In the air, radar technology uses radio waves and microwaves to detect objects. Radar stations constantly emit these waves into the air. When an object like a ship or aeroplane hits the path of this wave it gets reflected back. The radar then picks up the reflected waves and determines the class of object, its speed and material constitution. For example, an oil tanker will have a different signature than a fishing trawler even if they are travelling at the same speed. Often friendly ships also emit identification signals unique to them.

Under the water microwaves and radio waves cannot be used because they get absorbed by the water medium. Sound waves are used underwater. A sonar station emits sound waves and waits for reflections to return so that it can identify all objects in the range of the sound signals it emits. Ship engines also emit distinctive sound signatures that are picked up by the sonar station and which help in identifying them.

Challenges

The echoes received using the radar and sonar get picked up in a tracker. They show up as small blips on the screen. Small rubber dingies of the kind used by the terrorists show up as a blur. These are often ignored or deliberately not picked up because there are many such small crafts in the ocean. Often these have to be intercepted by the Coast Guard in their rounds, because the radar and sonar technology cannot detect them effectively.

Improving detection capability

A solution to this is to have a dense network of radar and sonar stations in busy coastal areas like Mumbai harbour. Within this network there has to be constant exchange of information. Just like in the mobile network as you move from one base station to another, your service provider picks you up and identifies you as being the same customer, within this network seamless identification of objects from one radar and sonar station to another needs to occur. It is not possible to track each radar and sonar station manually. So just like software programs allow seamless transfer between mobile towers in a cellphone network, software programs need to control the radar and sonar stations.

Also algorithms to detect unusual behaviour need to used. In the case of the Mumbai terrorists, they are believed to have transferred to the smaller dinghy from a fishing trawler. A radar and sonar network would have picked this as unusual behaviour and would have alerted the coast guard.

Today we have put Chandrayaan on the moon. Our scientists are capable of producing high technology to counter terrorism too. Let us utilize their skills to counter terrorism. We are an emerging technology superpower, lets learn to use technology in every sphere of life, from securing a good standard of living to protecting ourselves against enemies.

Read: Fighting Terror Series

Changing Rural India With IT

2008-11-29T11:01:00.000+05:30

This article first appeared in the November 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

All the talk of India being an IT superpower needs to be tempered with the fact that a large section of the country’s population still remains untouched by the benefits of technology. And that represents a huge opportunity for start-ups.

Look at any start-up that made it big and you will notice that it succeeded in building up a huge user community. Google, Hotmail, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Microsoft, Cisco, etc, targeted every individual in their country of origin and provided a solution each one of them could use.

Many of these started out with very simple ideas; for example, all Google tried to do was index a majority of the Web, rank search results in an intuitive fashion and present a clean interface to its users. But its aim to reach out to each and every Internet user, prodded it on to constantly improve its technology, enabling it to influence the target population, thus fuelling its meteoric growth. The formula seems simple enough—the start-up first needs to identify a need among a large population set. It then has to address the identified need with the appropriate technology. Finally, it has to persuade users to adopt the developed technology.

Sometimes, the technology may be useful for a large population but before mass adoption, its price might need to come down. Mobile phones, television sets, personal computers, Internet, automobiles—each of them had to come below a threshold price before mass adoption.

Indian start-ups, foreign models

Much of India is poor, as the income pyramid in the figure shows. Take a look at the education pyramid of India. Close to half the population is illiterate or semi-literate. In contrast, in the US, where many of the start-ups mentioned began, the base of the technology-literacy pyramid is not so broad. If you look at the penetration of say Google or Microsoft in India, you will notice that only the uppermost tip of the pyramid has been touched by these technologies. The likes of Google and Microsoft are hugely successful because of their almost total coverage of the US and other developed markets. India is still a very small contributor to their revenues.

India's Income Pyramid

India's Education Pyramid

Some of the most heavily funded start-ups in India are copycats that try to emulate the success of companies based in the US. The original ideas worked well in a developed market like the US because the profile of users is very different from that of India. But if you look at most of the start-ups that venture capitalists have supported in India, they are either in the space of social networking, game show SMSing, matrimony, job searches or other technologies that target the tiny tip of the pyramid. With such a small target base, will any of them become game changing start-ups? Unlikely.

Touching rural India

When India gained independence in 1947, much of its population was illiterate and poor. We did not even have food self-sufficiency, let alone any technological prowess. But today we stand at the threshold of explosive growth enabled by two events in our history—the green revolution and IT revolution. However, there is a major difference between the two. The green revolution was broad-based and benefited almost the entire population of India. The IT revolution has so far been concentrated on the tip of the pyramid. So, while we produce close to half a million engineers every year, we also have the largest population of illiterate people in any one country.

To become a game-changing start-up in India, one needs original ideas that are tailored for the specific mix of the Indian population. Ideas borrowed and handed down from the developed world will not work.

When ITC decided to set up an online crop-pricing portal, it didn’t copy eBay. Today, ITC’s eChoupal is one of the most popular online portals for farmers. eChoupal is a one-stop portal for crop prices, weather forecasts, farming techniques, etc. eChoupal not only helped the farmers get better prices for their produce, but it also invigorated the market by making it efficient and brought higher profits for the company. Today, there are over 6,000 eChoupals in India reaching out to about 4 million farmers and growing at a very fast rate.

Another very good example is Grameenphone in Bangladesh, which today counts 80 million of the poorest people among its subscribers. Grameenphone followed the microcredit model and envisioned a business where a cell phone can serve as a source of income for poor people. It turned the mobile phone into a production tool by promoting the village phone concept where women living in remote areas were given a mobile payphone and trained on how to operate it and how to charge others to use it at a profit. The phone was given to the women on loan from the Grameen Bank. Every phone user now became an active participant in the growth of Grameenphone, which today has annual revenues of $ 700 million.

Laying the foundation for an IT revolution

Today the farmers using eChoupal have been empowered by access to the latest rates. They get better rates for their produce, and ITC also makes higher profits. Similarly, Grameenphone has empowered poor villagers by bringing the power of communications to their doorstep. This connectivity has enabled them to become more productive and today Grameenphone is the biggest telecom service provider in Bangladesh.

But there are very few start-ups out there that are broad-based and can affect a large section of the population. Today, the Internet and IT are far removed from the lives of the majority of Indians.

We need to lay the foundation for tomorrow’s technologies that will take our gross domestic product (GDP) up just the way the green revolution did many decades ago. We need technologists and entrepreneurs who can think innovatively enough to spawn game-changing start-ups in India.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Advances in Medical Technology - Boon or Bane?

2008-11-27T10:57:00.006+05:30

The life expectancy of the average human being has increased dramatically from the time our ancestors roamed this earth – while it’s true that for each disease that’s been eradicated, a few more have cropped up, it’s also true that the medical profession has now gained a higher degree of control over ailments and their treatment methods. Technological advances in the way diseases are diagnosed, surgeries performed, drugs delivered, and treatments carried out, have made life simpler and more complicated at the same time.

Image courtesy www.clipartguide.com

While there’s no denying that more diseases and ailments are under control now, there are a few downsides to the rapid improvements in the field of medical technology and the invention of new and improved drugs, a few of which I’ve detailed below:

Prolonged life for the elderly: While this is not a bad thing per se, the quality of life deteriorates with age. Some old people are alive, but just barely so. They often have no one to take care of them and are forced to depend on strangers in nursing homes for their daily needs. Some of them would prefer to die with dignity, something they’re unable to do because of the machines and medicines that prolong life without doing anything to improve its quality.

Increased healthcare costs: Technology doesn’t come cheap, which is why healthcare costs are rising by the day and going through the roof as we try to find cures for new diseases that keep cropping up with lifestyle changes and sedentary habits. With more and more dependence on technology to treat our ills, medical expenses are going to soar out of the reach of the average human being.

Reliance on medicines: With pills and tablets available to control diseases like diabetes and blood pressure, people are moving away from healthier and natural lifestyles to one that is reliant on drugs and chemicals to live a life of higher quality. Regular exercise, a healthy diet, and a stress-free life with a positive attitude work wonders in keeping disease at bay. But not many people are willing to sweat a little in exchange for good health, not when they think they can get it out of a bottle.

Greedy drug companies: Drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers have never had it so good – they’re raking in the dollars because of the huge demand for their products. This tends to make them greedy – they’re in a rush to get new technology to the market, even before it’s been tested properly for possible side effects.

Advances are good, in any walk of life. But it’s up to us to use the technology wisely, in a way that’s beneficial to mankind, not just today, but way into the future too.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of Radiology Technician Education. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

India's Moon Mission: Lets Not Feel Proud About the Low Price Tag

2008-11-17T15:55:00.028+05:30

Chandrayaan is orbiting the moon. On 14th November it successfully placed the Indian Flag on the moon. With that India became only the 4th nation to have its flag on the moon.

World class technology

The Chandrayaan moon mission will add a lot of knowledge about the moon, that was so far unknown to mankind. As a result of the Chandrayaan mission, for the first time, a 3-D map of the complete moon's surface, including both the near-side and the far-side, will be available. Also for the first time a mineral map of the moon will become available. It will become known as to what minerals and chemicals are present at what locations on the moon.

For more pictures visit the official Chandrayaan site

Among other imaging technologies Chandrayaan carries the Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument which will help map the moon's terrain in 3-D. To create a 3-D atlas of the moon the laser ranging instrument sends out pulses of laser light on a strip of the lunar surface and then measures the reflected portion. In addition to laser images, the Chandrayaan carries instruments to take photographs in the visual and low-energy and high-energy x-ray regions. The images will help conduct chemical and mineralogical mapping of the moon's surface. This will let us know where and in what quantities minerals like aluminum, silicon, iron, calcium, uranium, thorium and even possibly water are present underneath the moon's surface.

World class scientists

Obviously the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) scientists are world class and have achieved great success in this and their earlier missions. With great precision they have put Chandrayaan in the moons orbit. All systems are working perfectly and the Chandrayaan has started its work to create a 3-D map of the moon and search for minerals there. Most ISRO scientists went to top universities and put in many years of hard work to obtain masters and PhD degrees. Undoubtedly they are some of the top brains in the country, after all they are rocket scientists!

Low price tag

The cost of the Chandrayaan mission has been pegged at Rs. 386 crores (under $90 million). To put that in perspective, a Boeing 747-400 costs over $200 million. American unmanned moon missions have cost atleast 5 times more. The last chinese mission to the moon cost at least two times more.

Low price tag obtained at the cost of scientists?

So should we be proud about the low price tag? How much of this reduction in price has come from producing technology at lower cost using innovative methods and how much has come from underpaying human resources. Well the fact is that we have grossly underpaid our human resources to cut costs. The following table gives the salaries that ISRO scientists are paid (after the pay revision in the Sixth Pay Commission) and compares them to the salaries in the Information Technology sector in India.

Scientist Grade	Years of Experience after Bachelors	Monthly Pay^	Pay in IT sector*
Scientist B	0-4 years	15,600-39,100 +(5,400)	Rs.30,000
Scientist C	4-9 years	15,600-39,100 +(6,600)	Rs.58,000
Scientist D	9-14 years	15,600-39,100 +(7,600)	Rs.100,000
Scientist E	14-18 years	39,200-67,000 +(8,700)	Rs.142,000
Scientist F	19-24 years	39,200-67,000 +(8,900)	Rs.183,000
Scientist G	>24 years	39,200-67,000 +(10,000)	Rs.225,000
Scientist H	>24 years	39,200-67,000 +(12,000)	Rs.225,000

(^These are the basic salary ranges for the given grade. The figures in the brackets are the grade pay. To get the gross salary add the grade pay and 30% HRA + 16% DA of the basic to current basic salary. DA is linked to the inflation and typically rises about 3% every four months and today stands at 16%. For example, a scientist B on joining would get 15,600 + 5,400 + (0.3+0.16) x 15,600 = 28, 176)
(*IT sector salary has been computed using the formula: annual salary after n years = Rs (3 + n x 1) lakhs, while not exact this formula gives a reasonably accurate lower bound. Most scientists have higher degrees like MTech and PhD, in which case the multiplicative factor can range between 1.1 to 1.5. Remember this is a lower bound for salaries in this sector. If you are aware of a better formula do let me know)

Now take a look at the following table to see how much Boeing and NASA are paying their scientists.

Organization and Post	Average Annual Salary
ISRO Scientist	$12,000
NASA Scientist	$88,000
Boeing Scientist	$89,000

Should we feel great about the low price tag of Rs 386 crores for the Chandrayaan? Hardly.

I dream of being a space scientist but will actually become an accountant

While it is not necessary that our scientists should be paid salaries that equal those of NASA scientists, we must at least keep in view the Indian market conditions. We must at least provide our scientists a decent standard of living. They shouldn't have to think how they will pay for the education of their children.

In a recent visit to a school when Dr. Abdul Kalam asked the students how many of them wanted to be engineers a few hands went up. When he asked how many wanted to to be doctors a few more hands went up. Finally when he asked how many wanted to be involved in the Mars mission, all hands went up. But the fact remains that very few young graduates are taking up a career with ISRO. When you are a ten year old you can afford to follow your dream. By the time you are ready to leave school reality sets in. More eighteen year olds in India prefer to be accountants than to be space scientists. ISRO hardly gets applications for its scientist posts. For graduating students from top institutes like IISc or IITs, the top career choice is an MNC and not ISRO.

Lets be proud about the success of the Chandrayaan mission. But lets not be proud about the low cost of our moon mission. That was achieved by grossly underpaying our scientists!

Read: The Chandrayaan-I and Water on the Moon Series

The Search Has Just Begun

2008-10-30T08:01:00.007+05:30

This article first appeared in the October 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

The Internet is a vast world waiting to be explored. And the maps for exploring it are just being made.

The earliest published maps are from Aristotle’s time (350 BC) and of course those maps, and many others even hundreds of years later, were inaccurate representations of the world. Much of the world was poorly known until aerial photography began being widely used to draw maps after the Second World War. It was only in the 1940s that accurate maps of the world became available.

If we draw a parallel to the data world on the Internet today, much of it remains unmapped and can even be said to be inaccurately mapped. By all accounts, we are still in the initial stages of organising, searching and allowing access to this vast amount of data.

Just like continents and countries existed even before accurate maps were drawn, the information exists but is waiting to be put correctly on the Internet. The maps of this data world are just beginning to be drawn.

Search engines

Early efforts to organise data revolved around manually drawing up categories and listing websites under them. Even today, dmoz.org tries to organise all of the Internet content under a directory system. For example, the Delhi Tourism website is listed under the category Travel, which itself is listed under Recreation. The same Delhi Tourism website is also listed under Shopping, Health, and numerous other categories because it contains information on each of these topics too. However, with the huge amounts of data present on the Internet, categorising and organising all the websites in this way is very challenging. If you visit dmoz.org, you will notice its limitations very quickly.

Today, the most popular way of categorising websites is using keywords. When you type in a keyword, you are taken to all the websites carrying information on that keyword. The websites are listed in an order depending on their relevance. This relevance is decided based on many factors like the popularity of the page, the number of references to it, etc. Our map of the Internet world is drawn by search engines. Google is vastly popular and today it is the Google view of the data world that billions of Internet users see. When we are looking for something, we type in the keywords and Google takes us there.

Take me to the hills
Let’s say you wanted to know about hills in and around Delhi. Who decides whether to take you to Sohna Hills, the Himalayas, the Aravalis or the hill on which Malai Mandir (a popular temple in Delhi) is situated? Well, today, for a vast majority of Internet users it is Google that decides. And how does it decide? It decides based on popularity. So if historically many people recommend Sohna hills, and if most people searching for hills are satisfied by being taken to Sohna Hills, it takes every new user to Sohna Hills. But what if that is not the hill you want to be taken to? Well, then you refine and re-refine the search keywords until you are taken to the place you want to visit.

It could get worse. Let’s say a very popular hotel is named Hill Town. Then you would get taken to this hotel even though it has nothing to do with a ‘hill’. This is like Christopher Columbus’ map that wrongly claimed America to be India. Unless some form of natural language understanding is incorporated into the search engine, these kinds of issues will be very hard to tackle.

Often the absence of historical data can also cause problems. Let’s say you want to search through your personal e-mails for hills around Delhi. Well, in the case of personal documents, the latest document gets the highest rank. In the real world, what this means is that if on your last trip you went to the Aravalis, this time too you will be taken there.

Issues with keyword-based search

There are vast amounts of data out there but search has huge limitations. The search engines available today have perfected keyword-based categorisation and retrieval but this is not the most ideal way to search. The keyword based view of the world is a very convoluted view. It is like saying that the earth comprises of words making up places and their latitude and longitudes, and there is no notion of land, continents, etc. In such a view, deducing that Kanpur and Delhi are inside India is not an easy task.

Maps of the world of sound and images have not even begun to be drawn. Can you search all movies where a male actor says, “You can take a horse to the water but you cannot make it drink?” Search engines today can only search text. So if someone has tagged an audio clip with these words, it will find it, but it cannot search the audio file itself. Search engines cannot search in the image, video or audio space.

The future of search

It is easy to forget that Google is just 10 years old. It turned 10 this September, beating many of the bigger and more accomplished players like Yahoo! and Alta Vista when it started out. Along the way it also beat back challenges from the likes of Microsoft. Today, Google is ahead because it has the most effective way of ranking search results. But is this the last word in search? No…this is only the beginning.

The effort to map the Internet world has just begun and the race is wide open. The next generation of search engines will have to achieve dmoz’s vision with the keyword-based categorisation technique’s efficiency. It will also have to incorporate natural language understanding. Search will have to be expanded beyond text and encompass images, video and audio. Either Google keeps on innovating or there is a start-up somewhere today that is going to steal a march on it. Sometimes, it is easy to forget that Google itself started out with just two people and beat back much bigger rivals. After all, a start-up needs just one good idea and a few dedicated people to succeed!

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Searching and Researching

2008-10-20T00:01:00.005+05:30

What is the number one activity for everyone on the internet today. Well it is searching.....we go searching for knowledge, information, entertainment, and even human connections on the internet.

I am beginning to wonder whether searching and researching have become synonymous today?

Researching before the internet world came along used to mean going out and physically probing nature. Scientists did that by designing and performing experiments. For school kids it meant physically doing something, like say sowing seeds and observing them germinate. For engineering students it meant performing experiments in the lab. The exercise of doing something and observing and learning from the observations was a valued part of learning.

But today what is the first thing we do when we want to research a subject? We go to google and search for related knowledge already existing out there. Then we convince ourselves that most of the stuff on the topic is already known, and go on to add some incremental stuff of our own. Even students, researchers and scientists seem to be doing exactly this.

This results in what is known being shared with ease. But it also means that knowledge keeps getting recycled. And well this kind of research produces new knowledge that is incremental in nature.

If you see history, in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries when people went out searching for continents, new lands, they didnt make great scientific advancements. Then in the 19th and 20th centuries, great scientific advancements were made. Could it be that today we are too focussed on data search and are again falling back on real scientific advancements?

ahajokes.com

Have we reduced researching to searching? In this internet era have we reduced every research problem into an exercise in search and incremental addition? Are original ideas scarce in todays world because of the way we think in this internet world?

A Dose of IT That Doctors Desperately Need

2008-09-29T00:01:00.000+05:30

This article first appeared in the September 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

While search, retrieval and storage technology has advanced tremendously on the enterprise front, doctors feel left behind. Their requirements are unique, and addressing their needs could save lives and improve the success rates in the medical domain. So, are there any adventurous technopreneurs who’ll take up this challenge?

In the past few years, the approach to medicine has changed drastically. You may have observed the tendency of doctors to prescribe numerous clinical and radiological examinations before setting out on a remedial course. For example, doctors increasingly rely upon images like x-rays, MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), ultrasound scans, CT (computed tomography) scans, PET (positron emission tomography) scans, etc, for diagnosis. This is indicative of the move towards evidence-based medicine.

When you visit a doctor, your medical condition is diagnosed based on the symptoms you exhibit at the time and your medical history. The doctor goes on to form one or more hypothesis on your possible medical ailment and proceeds to collect evidence to support or reject each hypothesis. So, for example, if a patient has severe pain in the abdomen accompanied by fever, the doctor may prescribe urine tests, blood tests and an ultrasound to narrow down the options. Once a doctor has pinpointed the specific medical condition, the relevant medicine is prescribed. The doctor may go in for surgical procedures, depending on the diagnosis. In each of the stages -- from hypothesis formation and diagnosis to medicinal or surgical intervention, doctors today are relying more and more on technology to help them. But there is scope for more technology in this space.

Data explosion

Many hospitals in India are moving to the digitised storage of patient data. The patient’s electronic medical records containing doctor reports, diagnosis notes, prescriptions, radiological images and other diagnostic data, are stored in electronic format. This enables easy search and retrieval, which means that every patient’s record is available to any doctor in the country. If you go in with abdominal pain and fever, the doctor can, within seconds, retrieve all similar cases, after suitable anonymisation, from across the country. This knowledge will help the doctor diagnose and treat you better.

Digital medical images, in terms of storage requirements, by far constitute the largest component of patient data. Medical images are viewed and interpreted by radiologists and subsequently by the attending physician. In lung cancer screening, for example, 40 to 400 CT images (depending on the resolution used) of the lung are obtained. It places a huge strain on the radiologist to read all the images, compare with lung pathology atlases, and give an opinion. It is valuable to store these images along with the expert opinion on them so that they may be referred to in the future, to compare cases and prescribe a particular treatment.

The clinical domain is seeing an explosion of data in recent times. Thanks to multimedia and network technologies, dedicated medical data grids are being set up to connect hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies. The data comprises patient records, peer-reviewed scientific journals, clinical studies, disease data, image repositories comprising radiological images, pathological images, laproscopy images, and cardiograms, along with case notes. Patient records with clinical studies and research publications can provide useful clues for diagnosis and treatment. There is a strong realisation that evidence-based medicine requires the availability of comprehensive data on the patient, combined with peer reviewed scientific evidence.

Data for doctors at their
finger tips

There are three types of data that are valuable to doctors:
• Case histories of similar ailments that they or their colleagues may have treated in the past.
• Scientific studies about latest treatment methods.
• Information on drugs and data on drug interactions and adverse reactions.

Typically, doctors examine a patient for about 10 minutes. During this time even if the medical network with the huge amount of data in it is made available to the doctors, they find it hard to extract information that is relevant to the case at hand. So usually, they rely on their medical training and personal experience to guide them. Only in cases where rare conditions are exhibited by the patient, do they take time to search through literature or case histories to determine the exact condition.

The main problem is that efficient technology for searching medical text and images does not exist. A Google-like interface for searching medical data doesn’t work because of the specialised nature of queries.

Doctors wouldn’t query something as general as ‘malaria’, but might like to query on specific points like, ‘the adverse effects observed in using Rifampin with quinine in treating malaria’. Also, in response to their queries, they wouldn’t want to be shown thousands of documents but would prefer the relevant portions that address their particular query. So the system needs to work more like a question answering system rather than like a generic query-based retrieval system that today’s technology provides.

Similarly, if doctors want to know how lung cancer patients responded to a particular drug, they wouldn’t want to screen thousands of lung CT images. They need a system to select the most relevant images and present those to them. Doctors would rather give their valuable time to a patient than spend unnecessary time in searching through a maze of data. Tools for manipulating medical images are still quite rudimentary. While work has been done for the handling of photographic images, sufficient attention has not been paid to images in the medical domain. For accurate diagnoses, subtle differences between images need to be captured and effective methods for doing that need to be invented.

Today we are at a stage where the infrastructure for the storage, retrieval and search of medical data needs to be set up. Technologies that can do this even at a hospital level would be keenly adopted. There is a huge technology gap that can be filled by budding technologists in start-ups, focused on addressing the needs of medical practitioners.

In a recent study conducted by Nobhojit Roy, Neha Madhiwalla and Sanjay Pai on drug promotional practices in Mumbai, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, it was found that doctors often did not have the entire information about a drug’s interactions and adverse reactions. Their only source of information on drugs are medical representatives who often do not give the complete information and have vested interest in promoting a drug. It is the patient who suffers because of this lack of information.

There is a need among doctors today for tools that allow them to access disease and drug related information quickly. Doctors would value technology that allows them to treat their patients better. In rural areas, access to a medical online grid with a data search and retrieval capability would help multiply the reach and effectiveness of a doctor many times over.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

ilm: I Learn More

2008-09-22T10:52:00.011+05:30

Every Friday, I and some of my colleagues watch movies at work over lunch. We have been doing this for about 3 months now.

We call this lunch seminar series --- ilm. ILM is an acronym for I Learn More. Also interestingly in persian/arabic ilm means beneficial knowledge.

Typically we pick inspirational movies from ted.com. Ted is a collection of 10-20 minute talks by some of the greatest thinkers of our times.

My article on problems with higher education attracted a lot of comments. Along the way I got connected to other bloggers who are actually teachers. One is the Brazen Teacher. Her enthusiasm for learning and teaching is infectious. After talking with her I am encouraged to discuss our ilm seminar series which is all about learning and getting inspired.

Here I link two talks that cover the subject of education:

Sugata Mitra talks about the "Hole in the Wall Project" which I have covered in the first part of my article.

In the following talk Robert Ballard talks about exploring the oceans. This profession is as offbeat and as far away from the "normal" that you can get today! Ballard questions the current education system and asks whether it inspires kids enough to explore the unknown and find answers. This talk and my own thoughts inspired the second part of my article.

Have fun watching the talks!

IT Education In Need of a Reboot

2008-08-31T00:00:00.001+05:30

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

In spite of being considered an IT superpower, India is facing a shortage of talent in this field. Here’s a closer look at the reasons why, and some remedies..

India today produces about half a million engineers every year. But talk to the CEO of any company in India and he will tell you that there is a huge talent crunch. Whether the plan is to expand an existing company or to start a new one, the skills gap in the new hires is hurting growth plans. NASSCOM estimates that only one-fourth of the graduates from our engineering institutions are directly employable. What is our education system lacking in?

Hole in the wall

A famous series of experiments was conducted by NIIT in the late nineties—on the usage of computers and the Internet. Computers with Internet connections were placed in the midst of a slum and observations were made on how people learnt to use them. These computers were made accessible so that anybody could just walk up and start using them. A camera was placed on a nearby tree to observe user activity.

The observations were interesting to say the least. The most avid users were kids aged between 6 and 12 years. Since no instructor was present, the kids had to discover for themselves what they could do with the computer. Within a few days they had learnt to draw and browse the Internet, without a ‘teacher’ intervening. The kids learnt by trial and error as a group, with some of them leading the others. But after a while, their skills tended to plateau out. The ‘teachers’ then intervened, taught some of the kids how to play MP3 songs on the computer, and left. Within a few days the kids had learnt where to download songs from, what players could play songs and everything else related to online music content. Within a few weeks, the slum kids had reached the level of proficiency of an average computer user.

To emphasise the point, NIIT picked a few Class 9 school children and asked them a few questions from the Class 10 physics syllabus. Obviously, they could not answer them. The kids were then given two hours on computers with Internet connections to research and answer the questions. At the end of two hours, they had all the answers. Just to make sure they had understood what they’d read and hadn’t just done some rote learning, a physics teacher quizzed them. He was not surprised when he found out that the students indeed had learnt quite a bit on the subject by going online and learning on their own.

The point is that if the students are motivated, they can find answers to many questions on their own. For young people, teaching should be all about arousing their curiosity. If their curiosity is aroused, then they can be motivated to learn just about anything. These young people then carry this curiosity and enthusiasm to their workplace.

Hole in technology skills

Today, more than half the IIT students don’t pursue a career in their branch of study. So most civil engineering students end up in IT jobs, computer science students end up in finance and banking jobs,and so on. This is also true of non-IIT engineering graduates across the country (to a slightly lesser degree than in the IITs). Students are viewing college education as just a degree in their pocket. The content of this education is not valued by them.

This also means that very few students are opting for higher studies. India hardly produces any PhDs today. Why? We don’t produce students who are curious and who love learning. Getting a PhD involves asking some deep questions and answering them over a period of three to four years. In the IITs, less than 10 per cent of undergraduate students go into research. The numbers are worse in non-IIT colleges. India produces less than 1000 PhDs in science and engineering, in a year. So where are the new cutting edge technologies going to come from? Perhaps from China and USA, where students still seem curious enough to ask deep questions. China and USA, each produce over 40,000 PhDs every year in science and engineering subjects.

These trends show that our universities have failed to inculcate a love for the subject. Entering an IIT is the toughest job in the world. The brightest eighteen- and nineteen-year olds in the world enter the IIT system. But four years later, they don’t even want to remain in the same field, let alone ask any deep or probing questions, answering which will lead to the next generation of technology. The quality of the final year thesis produced by these students has been falling over the years, and many recent theses have large parts 'inspired' by Wikipedia and other Web sources.

By 2010, a NASSCOM study forecasts a shortage of 500, 000 professional employees in the technology sector. Our engineering curriculum is not producing engineers with the right skills and motivation levels. What is the solution?

Choice in course selection

It is very simple--if you are doing something you like, you are more likely to excel in it. One solution is to offer more choice. Colleges should move to an electives-driven curriculum. Engineering students in India do about 50 to 60 courses in four years. Of these, 40 to 45 are core courses in whose selection they have no choice and only 5 to 15 are electives, which they can choose. If students had more electives, they would take more courses that they are interested in rather than just sit through courses that they don’t want to do. Today when students move to the workplace, they lack initiative because their college education was limiting and didn’t encourage them to explore their full spectrum of interests.

More interaction between different branches

We need to move to a system that has softer separation between branches of study. In engineering colleges, strict demarcations exist between various departments. A person in the civil engineering department has little or nothing to do with a person, in say, the electrical engineering department. Our universities must move to a more flexible and interactive setting. Any CEO of a start-up will tell you that while they look for depth in one field, they also look for flexibility, versatility and broad curiosity that comes from being exposed to a wide spectrum of areas. Every employee of a start-up has to do multi-tasking and has to be good at multiple things. Even in more established companies, employees with a broader perspective and knowledge are more successful in the fast changing technology space, because they can quickly take ideas from one sphere and apply them to another.

Industry participation

Most importantly, industry participation needs to be increased. Today, at least a year or two is spent in getting a fresh graduate up to speed. This lag needs to be reduced. Every college student today asks without getting any answers: “What am I studying this for? Will I ever use this after I leave college?” Because the need is not clear, they go through their courses disinterestedly. Students do not come across real-life cases until they are on a job, and by then it is too late. There is a large gap between what they study and what the job requires. Once on the job, they have to recast the skills learnt in college based on real life scenarios. Management education has been so successful because management courses involve case studies and problems from real life.

On their part, it must be said that technical education institutions are willing to change. They have rolled out the red carpet to industry captains to partner them. However, industry leaders have been too busy to heed their request. Instead, companies today have entered this endless race for poaching employees from competitors. This has hurt industry by driving up salaries and attrition rates. Industry must partner technical institutions in taking a hard look at the curriculum and revamp it to keep up with the knowledge-based economy.

We need a workforce that is agile to keep up with the needs of the marketplace. We need a workforce that takes initiatives and generates the technologies of tomorrow in this changing marketplace.

Our education system should be equipped to produce this workforce.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Today’s Athletes Stronger and Faster?

2008-08-13T14:02:00.007+05:30

It is interesting to note the world record progression in athletics and try to attribute reasons to them.

Compare the world record timings in the 100 meters men’s sprint; 1912, Don Lippincott of USA, set the world record with a 10.6 seconds sprint; in 2008, Usain Bolt of Jamaica holds the world record for his timing of 9.69 seconds set at the Beijing Olympics. In the men’s 800 meters event; Mel Sheppard of USA set the world record timing of 112.8 seconds in 1908; in 2008 the world record timing is 101.11 seconds set by Wilson Kipketer of Denmark in 1997. This progression to faster timings is true in all Olympic level athletics events.

Are the better timings an indication of athletes getting better or is it an indication of technology making them seem stronger and faster. The genetic make up of the human race could not have changed drastically in a hundred years. So that leaves training, nutrition and equipment which could have resulted in the improvements.

Training for 100 m sprint may seem simple, just practice sprinting every day. Well 100 years ago maybe that is all one had to do but over the years training programs have gotten a lot more complex. Today a sprinter plans and orchestrates each and every stride in her run. All the muscle and limb movements are coordinated to achieve maximum speed and power. Today’s technology is geared to help athletes do this better. The effect of every muscle is mapped out. Weight training programs pinpoint the muscles needed for a given type of race and enhance their volume, power and speed individually. In Olympic sprinters, 80 percent of their muscle volume comprises fast twitch muscle fibers, while those who excel in marathons tend to have 80 percent slow twitch fibers. Today training programs exist to condition and enhance one type of muscle fiber or even convert one type of muscle fiber to the other. The effects of training on muscle metabolism are also well known and various personalized nutritional supplements are given to the top athletes.

Sports equipment has undoubtedly been another factor in enhancing performance. For an elite athlete even the properties of her footwear are personalized for maximum performance. Athletes for example wear shoes with very stiff soles. By using stiff soles an athlete is able to generate energy more efficiently in the ankle joint. This is simple physics, the stiff sole acts as a longer lever about the ankle joint and produces more force. The synthetic Tartan track used today, first used in at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, has been shown to aid in faster running.

Perhaps the natural abilities of the athletes of the past were at par with those today. What separates them is the way those natural abilities are nurtured to enable them to go stronger and faster.

Digital Visualization of Our Heritage

2008-07-31T11:20:00.011+05:30

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

Huffing and puffing your way around sites of interest could soon be a thing of the past, with virtual 3D tours of many interesting places being made available. Is that a good thing or bad? Well, consider that you save money, time and energy—and the site that you’d have visited has one less visitor pounding its pavements, slowing down by a tiny bit, the deterioration that many historical sites experience.

Have you looked out of the window of the airplane before it lands in Delhi and tried to locate the Qutub Minar to enjoy an aerial view? India has many heritage sites of great historical significance. Every city has a few. But we still do not have good quality digital models of the historical sites that can be accessed and viewed on a computer. Do you want to see the Qutub Minar from every angle? Or go up the staircase inside the Qutub Minar, which has been closed to the public for the past many years? Do you want to zoom in and see from close quarters the inscriptions on the top part of the Qutub Minar, which you can never access otherwise? With the technology available today, is it possible to create digital maps of different historical monuments in India?

The Eternal Egypt project shows interactive multimedia animation, virtual environments, panoramas and 3D scans of historical Egyptian monuments and artifacts. Sitting in front of your computer, it is possible to view historical monuments from different angles and distances! There are, of course, many ways of creating a digital structure. To create a digital map of a structure using digital photographs, three steps are involved: capturing photographs of the location from many angles, stitching the photographs together, and creating one seamless model out of the many photographs.

How to digitally capture a monument

With the digital cameras available today, it is possible to click photos of a given monument very easily. The more photos, the better, as every different angle and every little aspect of the monument will get covered. No special skills are required. Amateur photos will do. They can be mixture of photographs taken by different people using many different cameras, under varying shooting conditions, different dates, times of day, resolutions, and so on. It is also possible to include photographs of the parts that are not open for public viewing—so even though you and I are not allowed to use the staircase in the Qutub Minar, those from the Archeological Survey of India can click photos of it.

The next step is to combine the hundreds or even thousands of photographs together using a computer program. Each monument has distinctive features, like windows, minarets, figurines, carvings, etc. These act as the anchor points to stitch the photographs together. The software program first needs to identify these anchor points and features in each photograph, and then combines the images by superimposing the identified features.

Finally, the stitched photographs need to be combined into one panoramic view. The monument will now appear as one combined model, instead of the series of separate photographs of which it is actually composed. The viewer seamlessly views the monument from different angles, zoom lengths and lighting conditions, with the click of the mouse.

Digital visualisation of monuments is an interesting and challenging application that brings together animation engineers, people with cameras... artists and preservationists. Many times, the technology used in one application can be used in other contexts with telling effect.

Preserving the historical sites that are part of our cultural heritage is very important. Digital models made available online also allow a wider audience to see and tour these sites. Historical monuments are often subject to human and natural forces that cause damage to them. The Taj Mahal is subject to erosion, and possibly irreversible damage is taking place right now to its surface and structure. Many monuments have even been subjected to vandalism. Most of the monuments have already gone through many phases of construction, damage, and repair. Keeping accurate record of these sites using digital models lets preservationists track changes, foresee structural problems and study the effects of restoration efforts.

Multiple Applications

This technology need not be limited to viewing monuments. The same idea is used by the “hawk eye” to track the motion of a cricket ball or tennis ball, using multiple views from different cameras. Automobile websites show cars and motorbikes from different angles using this idea. Technically, it is possible to create a three-dimensional view of any object that you like, using multiple photographs.

The quality of the models will depend on the quality of the images used. Laser imaging photographs can be used to create high-quality 3D models, but even using just normal photographs, stunning results can be obtained.

Animation Boom

The animation sector in India is witnessing a boom, but the work is driven by the major Hollywood studios like Walt Disney, Warner Brothers and Sony, who outsource parts of their movies to Indian animation companies. The positive side to this is that India now has many youngsters skilled in creating world-quality animation. The challenge now is to focus their attention on interesting applications that have relevance in the Indian context. Animation technicians who are today totally focused on movie-making for foreign studios should start looking at new locally-relevant avenues for their work.

Digital visualisation of monuments is an interesting and challenging application that brings together animation engineers, people with cameras (not just professional photographers), artists and preservationists. Many times, the technology used in one application can be used in other contexts with telling effect. Animation is one such technology that has wide applications in various areas.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Technology On The Cricket Pitch

2008-06-30T08:21:00.013+05:30

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

Technology today is affecting not only how cricket is played, but also how audiences enjoy the game.

"Yes, Hawk-Eye confirms that the ball is just missing the off stump, so the umpire was right in giving the Not Out decision,” said Ravi Shastri, ex-cricketer and well known television commentator, while commenting on a cricket match for a national TV audience.

Hawk-Eye, the computer system used to track the path of the cricket ball, was first introduced in 2001. It uses computer software to combine the view from six or more cameras to construct a three dimensional representation of the cricket ball’s path. So when the ball hits the batsman’s pads, it predicts how the ball would have continued to travel had it not hit the pads. Today, it is used to enhance the viewing experience for television audiences. While the umpire’s decision is final, commentators use Hawk-Eye’s prediction to evaluate LBW decisions and provide technical analysis.

Bowling analysis

Increasingly, the virtual strip pops up on the television screen, to show the ball’s motion and a ball pitch map. A computer rendering of the pitch is made where every ball is mapped from the real field to the computer rendered field. It now becomes possible to compare every ball with other balls in the over and in the match. Bowlerlevel statistics can then be aggregated to show where a bowler has been pitching the ball. Similarly, for the batsman, an aggregated view of his shots, the wagon wheel, is shown.

Most of the technology in cricket has been introduced by broadcasters to enhance the viewing pleasure for television audiences.

The speed gun

Statistics like bowling speed, measured using a speed gun, are of great interest to viewers. A speed gun uses radar technology to measure how radio waves are reflected by the ball, as it travels through the air after leaving the bowler’s hand; and the speed is immediately displayed on our TV screens.

The eyes and ears of the stump!

The ‘Stump Vision’ camera was another innovative use of technology that made its entry in the late 1990s. A small camera is fitted on the stump, connected using an underground wire, to give a stump-level view of the playing field.

The snick-o-meter is used to determine whether the ball had hit the bat, in contentious caught-behind decisions. A stump mike picks up all the sounds in the vicinity. Audio processing software is used to analyse the sounds that this mike picks up. Ambient noise (like crowd noise) is cancelled out from the sound picked up by this mike, to highlight relevant sounds like faint nicks of the ball on the bat.

These are technologies that we have all become familiar with. And television broadcasters are looking at yet newer technologies that can enhance the kind of technical analysis provided to the viewers.

Imperfect Technology

Like all computer technology, the aids used in cricket too can make mistakes. Hawk-Eye, for all the numerous cameras it uses, can still be incorrect. Pitches have uneven bounce, the amount of spin imparted to the ball cannot be measured by cameras, there is ball movement through the air; so even though Hawk-Eye tracks the ball through the 18 or so yards before it hits the batsman’s pads, it can still make errors in predicting the trajectory through the remaining distance before hitting the stumps.

Similarly, the snick-o-meter can pick up sounds other than the ball hitting the bat—like the boot movement (of the batsman or keeper), pads rubbing etc. Even the speed gun is not totally accurate. For example, the ball speed when it reaches the batsman can be different from when the ball was dispatched by the bowler.

Future technologies for cricket

Technology, however, is constantly improving. Infrared cameras have been tested in place of snick-o-meters; they can pick up friction readings, and are close to 100 per cent accurate in detecting snicks. There are now also balls available with built-in speedometers. Fit a transmitting device on such a ball, and you can have the speed of the ball at any given instant.

With so much competition between rival broadcasters, the race is on to maximise the viewing pleasure. One plan is to put wireless tracking devices on individual players. This device would measure and transmit live data during the game, to a central computer. Parameters tracked by this device include the running speed of a player, a bowler’s speed during the run-up, the maximum speed and average running speed, the number of times a player changes direction, distances travelled, heart rates, etc. Very soon, such data relating to the bowler and fielders will be flashed to viewers. Commentators will also have a lot more data about individual players at their disposal. But imagine the pressure it will put on the fielders. Today it is only the umpires who are scrutinised for their decisions. Soon, it will be possible to minutely analyse every player’s activities on the field in real time. We will know the exact reasons for why one agile player managed to stop the ball whizzing past him to the boundary, and why another player was not able to.

Processing technology currently being used in video surveillance, object recognition and machine vision among others, needs to be tailored for and applied to cricket.

Technology for coaching

With the coming of IPL (Indian Premier League) and ICL (Indian Cricket League), crores of rupees have been staked on individual players. Franchisees want value for the money they are paying the players; they want the players to perform to their full potential. In 2007, the coaching staff of the English team loaded players’ iPods with clips of opposition players in action, along with footage of their own players, for analysis. Individual players were glued to their iPods, looking for weaknesses in the opposition players’ approaches, and their own team’s strengths. But these video clips were manually selected by coaches after going through numerous videos. What if technology is used to index and search the huge collection of match videos? Also, statistics can be automatically derived from these videos.

Imagine how useful information about individual players can be. What are the typical ways a particular player gets out? How does he play against short-pitched deliveries? What is his scoring rate when faced with good-length deliveries outside the off stump? Such information can be vital to bowlers. It is just a matter of time before the coaches start looking for aids that provide this. So will technology enable this?

In every second of video, there are 25 or more frames. Each frame comprises small dots called pixels. So as a white ball moves, the white pixels corresponding to it move from frame to frame. With multiple cameras, the view of the pitch and the ball is available from multiple angles. Video processing allows objects of interest to be tracked from frame to frame, automatically. So it is possible to track the ball, the bat, or a player, within a series of images. The result of such models will be individualised performance charts derived from past matches. When a player goes through a rough patch, he can compare his shots to the same balls during the purple patch, on a computer. But such technology for cricket still needs to be developed. Processing technology currently being used in video surveillance, object recognition and machine vision among others, needs to be tailored for and applied to cricket.

In real match conditions, there are so many factors that affect players—from weather, the spectators, the state of the ball, to the mental tussle between bowler and batsman trying to outsmart and out-think the other. But with more information about the conditions, the opposition and about one’s own abilities, there is a definite advantage to be had.

StumpVision was one of the first startups (Anil Kumble, India’s current Test captain and a great spin bowler, runs it) in the sports software space in India. Now that more and more attention and money is being focused on technology for cricket, many more are bound to follow. IPL and ICL will provide the impetus for many start-ups that will focus on enhancing the player’s ability and the audience’s viewing pleasure.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

The Science of Advertising: Targeting you with the things you need

2008-05-31T00:01:00.012+05:30

This article first appeared in the May 2008 issue of it magazine. This is part of the Folk Technology series that I write every month.

Do you know how advertisers plan their Campaigns? They want to target the right audience with the right product in the right way. To do that they study audience behaviour. Read on....

Do you think you are affected by advertisements? Do you recognise the companies with the slogans, ‘Information technology, today, tomorrow’, ‘Just do it’, ‘Connecting people’, ‘Fly the good times’, ‘Wherever you go our network follows’, ‘Connecting India’, ‘The nation banks on us’, and ‘Taste the thunder’? If you recall even some of these, then you have to agree that advertisements do have some impact on you.

Companies spend crores of rupees on advertising because they know consumers are affected by advertising. The goal of advertising is to influence the purchasing behaviour of as large a population of consumers as possible. So how do companies plan their advertising expenditure?

Ad pricing

On traditional advertising media like TV, radio, print and billboards, the pricing is based on how many eyeballs or ears the advertisement captures. This is the cost-per-view model. For TV or radio, ad rates go up during a cricket match, because there will be a larger audience. Print ad rates are also based on the total readership of the edition.

In the world of online advertising, pricing is more complicated. Not only do you have cost per view options, but could also have cost per click (based on the number of times the ad is clicked on); or, if it is an online merchandising site, then it is based on ‘cost per action’—the number of times a product is purchased. The pricing model can be fixed or dynamic. The most popular dynamic model is the search-term-based advertising that has been popularised by Google. An advertiser has to bid for a keyword in an online auction. Popular keywords like ‘job’ go for many thousands of rupees; less popular keywords like, let's say, ‘lalu’ go very cheap. Have you noticed the sponsored links to the right of your Google search results? The advertiser showing up at the number one spot bid the highest for the keyword you used in your search; those who bid less are ranked below this. Every time you click a sponsored link, the advertiser has to pay the amount that they bid to Google.

We are watching you: We know what you need

Advertisers today try to collect as much information about you as they can—they can cash in on this knowledge by serving you ads tailored to your preferences or positioned to take advantage of your plans, as determined by your online activities. For example, when you search for a tandoori restaurant, the search engine dishes out related sponsored ads based on your search ‘interest’—your apparent plans to eat out. Similarly, when you read an e-mail about summer vacation plans in Goa, your friendly e-mail provider serves you hotel and airline booking ads, hoping to capture a booking or sale for their advertisers. This is true of SMS messages too; every SMS you send is automatically analysed to learn your interests, and to serve you relevant advertisements.

Getting icons to advertise

How do advertisers convince you to buy their products? One approach is to get a social icon—for example, Shahrukh Khan or Preity Zinta—to be their brand ambassador; you would tend to buy products thus advertised, because of your admiration for the person endorsing the product. But this is a pretty expensive proposition, because brand ambassadors come at a premium.

Social network analysis

So what's the next best thing to brand ambassadors? Analysing your behaviour and trying to find out which of your friends influence your purchase decisions! Man is a social animal and that fact is only now beginning to get exploited by advertisers—they try to influence you through the people whom you admire, with the added advantage of minimal expenditure.

Do you know me? Well, the chances are that you and I don’t know each other directly but have mutual friends. I may have a friend who has another friend, and that person is your friend—so you and I are within 3 degrees of separation. Experiments conducted in a limited setting show that, on average, only 6 degrees of separation exist between any two people. Others have extended those results to imply that anybody in this world is within 6 degrees of separation from anyone else.

If you have an account on a social networking site like Orkut, LinkedIn, BigAdda, or Facebook, then you can experience this first hand—you may directly know only 30 to 40 people, but count your contacts' contacts and further, and you can see the number of people grows exponentially with each degree of separation.

A social graph is a mapping of every person in this world, and how we are related in a given context. For example, if it is known that I am your school friend, and that both of us like cricket, then maybe only the more outgoing between us needs to be targeted—that way, if you are influenced to buy a Tendulkar autographed cricket bat, then most likely, I will also buy one, following your example.

Advertising to groups

Advertisers have long known that referral is the best way to influence consumer behaviour. When someone you know recommends a product, you are likely to be influenced by that. Today, on many social networking sites, people with shared interests form communities. Facebook, for example, wants to exploit this by targeting user communities. From your interactions, it becomes amply clear who your friends are and what your interests are, so ads that address your needs are served to you. That means that if you belong to, say, a bathroom singers group, then ads for music CDs, iPods and other music-related items would be thrown at you. The more influential in your group are enticed into buying first, and then recommending it to others.

Telecom graphs

Telecom companies are beginning to exploit ‘Who’s calling who’ graphs of millions of users, each with their own characteristics. Let's say you make an average of 25 calls per day. Some of these are to people you call regularly. Telecom companies analyse your calling behaviour, and that of your group, to decide calling and marketing schemes for you. For example, if the majority of your friends' group subscribes to caller tunes, and you don’t, then that automatically makes you a candidate for marketing caller tunes. After all, birds of the same feather flock together! Telecom companies keep track of group leaders. If you are always the first in your group to try out new offerings, and others follow your lead, then your clout can be exploited to reach your friends.

Mathematical modelling

For mathematicians and computer scientists, this is an interesting problem - second guessing consumer behaviour, based on past actions and current friends. Companies who have the customer data usually do not have the inhouse capability to analyse it, so analysis is outsourced to companies that specialise in Social Network Analysis.

Consumers get irritated if they are served too many irrelevant ads, so the idea is to serve them only the most relevant ones, and not bore them with ads that they are unlikely to follow up on. But this is an enormous problem—can you imagine the size of the telecom graph of a typical service provider in India? Even if we take just 2 million active users, that graph is huge! Analysing this graph to find potential leaders is really difficult.

Telecom companies are beginning to exploit ‘Who’s calling who’ graphs of millions of users, each with their own characteristics, to analyse their calling behaviour, and that of their group's, to decide calling and marketing schemes.

Forming graphs and identifying key players

This could be a ‘Who’s calling who’ graph, which shows how a set of people are connected to each other. The telecom company will be most interested in Juhi and Rajat, who seem to be central characters in their groups. They seem to be central links holding together their respective groups. Advertisers would like to use them for targeted ads, and to influence others. The telecom company will go out of the way to keep such central characters within its fold.

Also of interest are Sid and Tara, who are connections to outside groups; by targeting them, new groups can be reached. If Juhi’s group is with Vodafone and Rajat’s group with Idea, then for Vodafone to get new customers, it has to target Sid to get his Idea friends along. It also means that Sid is a candidate for leaving Vodafone and going to Idea, so either way, he needs special handling.

Telecom graphs can be huge, with millions of connections. Automatically drawing and analysing such large graphs to find the key players is a challenge for computer scientists.

Forming groups

Advertisers form connectivity graphs of people based on who they interact with. Then groups within them are identified, based on specific likings that are learnt based on the behaviour of the individuals. For example, if a person chats with his connections about cricket most of the time, if his site has pictures of cricketers, if all the YouTube videos he has tagged are cricket clippings, or he bought the Indian team T-Shirt online... that person must be a cricket fan. Learning these likings is challenging, and involves special software to track activities and map each activity to a group, using a set of rules. Rules can be hand-coded, or they can be learnt based on a limited set of examples. Once it is known who likes what, they can be served relevant ads. Though they may sometimes make mistakes and target us with wrong products, analysts are learning fast and trying to keep up with our changing needs, interests and likes.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

IPL: Doing Well?

2008-05-13T16:22:00.038+05:30

IPL is underway and by the following metrics it is doing well

Ad rates:

The ad rates for ten second clips on television is higher than ever for IPL 2008. Just see how the ad rates compare with past events:

Event	10s clip rate
2007 WorldCup	Rs 1.5 lakhs
T20 World Cup	Rs 2 lakhs
Saas Bahu Serials	Rs 70, 000
IPL	Rs 3 lakhs

TV Viewership:

Sony Set Max which telecasts the IPL matches live has generated huge viewership. 990 lakh viewers had tuned in for the 58 matches played till the finals. Just see how the viewership of the final compares with past events:

Event	Viewers
2007 WorldCup final	328 lakhs
2007 T20 World Cup final	483 lakhs
2006 Soccer World Cup final	7151 lakhs (67 lakhs in India)
2008 Super Bowl final	975 lakhs
2008 IPL final	660 lakhs expected

Profits from IPL in first year:

So do you know how much money IPL 2008 has generated for BCCI? A report brought out by the equity research division of Alchemy Share and Stock Brokers gives the following numbers:

Organization	Profit
total BCCI profits from IPL '08	Rs 350 crores
total BCCI profits in 2007	Rs 235 crores
Govt of India's sports budget for 2007	Rs 490 crores

Sponsorships on Keywords on Google (on 22/5/2008)(45/59 matches played):

Google lets advertisers bid for keywords. So when you type in a keyword for your search, say "IPL," on the right hand side, you will see "sponsored links." These sponsors would have bid for the keyword that you typed in. The highest bidder shows up on top. Popular keywords go for high prices. Less popular ones may be cheaper.

Keyword	Number of Sponsors	top Sponsors
IPL	3	Kingfisher, re-age, Kotak
T20	5	Vodafone, Kingfisher, SonyCameras, Dell, AidsMeds
Cricket	4	vdopia, kingfisher, aol, Ashishcs
Sachin Tendulkar	2	Kingfisher, Kotak

Other Team facts:

Team	Fact
Delhi Daredevils	20000+ Jerseys sold of Rs 1500 each (as on 22/5/08)
Kolkata Knight Riders	45495 Online Members (as on 1/6/08)
Delhi Daredevils Homeground, Feroshah Kotla, Delhi	42000 spectators, always full
Kolkata Kinght Riders	15 crore operating profit from IPL 08
Rajasthan Royals	10 crore operating profit from IPL 08

Energy Saving Search

2008-05-12T14:31:00.005+05:30

A friend introduced me to Blackle - The Energy Saving Search. Blackle uses a black screen to display google search. The premise is that a monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen. So by using a black screen for google search - which is one of the most common exercises done on a computer today - the savings add up substantially when aggregated over all the users.

Interestingly blackle.com seems to be the result of this blog - Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year.

AND 2008

2008-04-28T14:17:00.008+05:30

I am co-organizing the second workshop on Analytics for Noisy unstructured text Data (AND). This time it is co located with SIGIR 2008. We hope being co located with this premier Information Retrieval conference will help us get the IR community's perspective on this important topic.

AND 2008 will be on 24th July 2008 in Singapore. The last date for submission of papers is May 16, 2008.

AND 2007 was highly successful and resulted in several good papers that answered key questions in noisy text analytics. It also turned out to be the biggest workshop in IJCAI 2007 attracting over 60 participants.

AND 2007 was successful in doing the following:

Key sources of noisy data were highlighted
New techniques to process noisy data were presented

In AND 2008 we hope we will able to answer other deep questions:

Can the noise be modeled?
Is there one model or many...do different sources have different characteristics?
How is noisy text analytics different from text analytics?

In-Silico Drug Design

2008-03-31T11:08:00.027+05:30

This article first appeared in the Mar 2008 issue of i.t. magazine

Wet lab processes for researching compounds, which target specific proteins or enzymes, are costly and time-consuming. With the use of high-speed computers and some innovative software, drug design could be poised to move to the next level.

Drug design involves a two-step pre-clinical process. The first step is to identify and model the biological target within the body (the protein). The second step involves identifying a lead compound (molecule) that exhibits drug-like properties with respect to this protein. Subsequently, the drug goes through many phases of clinical development in humans. In the clinical phase, the drug is administered to human volunteers to determine:
• The passage of the drug through the body—from the time it is taken to the time it is excreted
• The effect of the drug on the body
• Its effectiveness on the disease being targeted
• Undesirable side effects of the drug

The last authoritative study on the cost of drug design was done by the Tufts Centre for Drug Development in 2001. It estimated that it costs $802 million, and takes about ten to fifteen years, to bring a new drug into the market. This cost includes abortive attempts at drugs that failed at different stages.

Traditional practice

Traditionally, the step of finding the lead compound is done in a laboratory. In-vitro screening involves observing the effects of a large number of compounds against the target protein. Molecules that are able to bind with the protein are selected and tested for their particular effect on the diseased cells.

The later clinical step studies the effect of the molecular compound on human volunteers, to understand its positive and negative effects on the body.

In-Silico drug design

The process of finding a drug molecule that attaches itself to the target protein in the body has now moved from the lab to the computer. When a protein target has been identified, it needs to be screened against a large database of known molecules, a method called virtual high-throughput screening. If a molecule fits the target protein, it can be further tested. Knowledge from molecular modelling, molecular biology and combinatorial chemistry is coded into software programs that help predict how the protein target and the drug molecule will come together. The techniques used today, which are continually being improved, do an approximate match to come up with possible hits or pairings. It would be impossible to test millions of molecules in a lab against a given target, but the computerised screening process helps in choosing a small set of molecules that can then be tested in a wet lab.

Computer software is now beginning to be used to study how the drug behaves inside the body

Drug design requires people with different skillsets and expertise to work together. The Indian CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) labs, along with TCS, developed the Bio-Suite—a software tool to aid in the drug discovery process. The domain knowledge came from CSIR and its partner labs, and the engineering and software work was done by TCS in this collaboration.

Pushing the frontiers of computing

Drug design is pushing the frontiers even in supercomputing: in computer architecture, in the software required to program and to control massively parallel systems, and in the use of computation to advance our understanding of important biological processes. The world’s fastest supercomputer, the IBM Blue Gene/L, is being used for drug design, among other applications. You, too, can help, by donating your free computer cycles for drug research - the World Community Grid has been formed by using donated computer time from users worldwide. The virtual supercomputer formed by connecting all these PCs together aims to create the largest public computing grid, with a mission to benefit humanity.

The world’s fastest supercomputer, the IBM Blue Gene/L, is being used for drug design, among other applications

The road ahead: Upcoming applications of computers in fighting diseases

While virtual screening is making huge strides today, there are other applications of computers in medicine that, though in their infancy, are still fascinating: virtual clinical testing and genetic medicine. We take a quick look at each of these arenas.

Virtual clinical testing: While it is important to find potential drug candidates, because of the cost and time involved, it is also important to catch potentially negative side effects as well as absorption and metabolic problems related with the molecule early in the drug discovery cycle, to either discard the molecule, or find ways to overcome the problems. Computer software is now beginning to be used to study how the drug behaves inside the body. To do this accurately, one needs to simulate the conditions of cells in the body. Many hundreds (sometimes, thousands!) of parameters need to be modelled, including body temperature, the disease conditions, the effect of body fluids on the drug molecule, etc. Biologists are working with IT professionals to build these capabilities into computer software, but this is a anything but a trivial problem, and so far only very rudimentary models exist.

Genetic medicine: A protein in our body is the expression of the genetic code unique to each individual. With the Human Genome Project having sequenced the whole genetic code of the human race, it is now possible to look at a disease at the genetic level. Gene tests are now available commercially, where everybody can get to know their own genetic code.

All diseases have a genetic component. This is true whether the disease was inherited, or resulted from the body’s response to environmental stresses like bacteria, viruses or toxins. One approach to identifying potential targets for a disease is to compare the differential expression of genes and proteins in normal and diseased cells and tissues. This way, the gene and protein involved in a given disease can be identified, and then a search for effective drug molecules could begin.

Another, more ambitious, target is to replace or supplement the faulty gene itself. In this arena, extensive computer simulations are required to model the cause analysis. Tools that exist are very basic, and that is why it is one of the most fertile areas of research today.

The future of medicine is exciting, and computers in medicine are leading to possibilities that were non-existent just a couple of decades ago!

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Call Centres Of The Future

2008-02-29T02:15:00.026+05:30

This article first appeared in the Feb 2008 issue of i.t. magazine

Having established itself as the call centre capital of the world, salaries are now increasing in India, attrition rates are very high, and infrastructure costs are rising. So how does the industry stay competitive? Call centres are now embracing technology to stay ahead.

"Hi, this is Ruchi. I am calling from Moneymoney bank, we have a pre-approved personal loan of Rs. 40,000 for you, madam..."

Does that sound familiar? How many times have you received such a call? Do you immediately hang up; do you humour the agent and carry on conversing; abuse the poor agent... or end up buying the product that she is selling?

A ‘call centre’ is a generic term for help desks, information lines and customer service centres. Call centres have become the central focus of many companies, as these centres stay in direct contact with the firm’s customers. Call centres are of two basic types: those that handle inbound calls, where customers call in for service, and outbound call centres, where agents from contact centres call customers to offer services. Call centres not only offer phone-based support, but also support through online chat, SMS and e-mail.

Call centre to the world

India, today, is the call centre to the world. Companies outsource their call centre operations because that way they can get access to skilled and expert staff without having to worry about recruiting them, training them and retaining them. India has both the skilled manpower and the lower costs that make it the preferred destination.

But running call centres is a highly competitive business. The same reasons that make India attractive could, in turn, make some other location attractive in the not so distant future. In India, salaries are increasing, attrition rates are very high, and infrastructure costs are rising. So how does the industry stay competitive? Call centres are embracing technology to stay ahead.

Computers as interviewers

The call centre industry in India is growing at the rate of 40 per cent per annum. However, attrition rates are as high as 30 per cent. This means that lots of people need to be hired. For every one person that you hire, you need to interview ten people. So the cost of hiring one person can be as high as Rs 20,000 if the screening cost is included. The cost of interviewing and hiring a thousand agents is itself a couple of crores. Large call centres hire a few thousand new employees every year, so the cost of interviewing is a major expense for them. As the call centres move to second-tier cities, it is expected that the ratio of hires-to-rejects will be even higher, making the hiring process even more expensive.

Call centres hope to reduce this cost by automating the first level of screening. Software to test human language skills now exists. The basic language skills needed by an agent include fluency, good vocabulary, good grammar, proper pronunciation and good comprehension. An interviewer marks each candidate based on these skills. Today, speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) technologies are maturing, and can be used to evaluate candidates on each of these parameters. For example, to test pronunciation, the system checks whether the person is laying stress on the correct syllables in a word. Many Indians pronounce available as ‘avlabel’, and a speech recognition system is able to detect the stress on the wrong syllables. Comparisons between automated systems and human interviewers show that they are usually in agreement about a candidate's worth, thus paving the way for automated screening processes to be put in place. Now it is only a matter of time before such systems are widely adopted. Very soon, your interviewer may be a computer. Kiosks can be set up in remote corners, and candidates can go there and get interviewed at their convenience.

Good agent, bad agent

Once candidates are hired, they are moved to the floor to take live calls from customers. Agents on the floor are typically evaluated based on their call handling time and the call outcome. The average handling time for a call varies from process to process, and can range from a few minutes to an hour. For example, if you have a bankingrelated query, you would talk with the agent for about five minutes. On the other hand, if the problem is regarding a hardware or software issue on your computer, the call to troubleshoot it could go on for an hour. The call outcome is measured in terms of specific goals or targets being met. For example, banking loan agents would be assessed on how many customers they were able to convince to take personal loans. Thus, agents are evaluated based on how many calls they took and how many of those calls resulted in successful outcomes. To be viable, a call centre must have its agents perform well on both these parameters.

The message, "Please note that this call may be recorded for training and evaluation purposes," should sound familiar to you? Most calls to a call centre are recorded and stored. Quality analysts review them to prepare agent-wise and general reports. They randomly select a few calls of individual agents, and then prepare reports on their strengths and shortcomings.

Natural language processing systems are capable of going through a large collection of calls and analysing the reasons for success and failure. Many agents, who were obviously fans of Amitabh Bachchan in Kaun Banega Crorepati, started using his famous phrase on foreign customers "Can I lock this for you?" The foreigners were not familiar with this phrase. A natural language system found that agents who simply asked, "Shall I make the booking for you?" made more bookings. Now, finding this kind of correlation between phrases and call outcomes is something that a human reviewing a few calls is unlikely to make out. But an NLP system analysing thousands of calls ‘sees’ this very easily. Such systems can be used to analyse the language and behaviour of ‘good’ agents, and compare them with the ‘bad’ agents to point out good practices that result in satisfied customers. Call centres are adopting natural language systems a lot more to analyse conversations, and to identify good and positive practices.

The science of selling

All companies want to know how best to sell. Typical outbound marketing calls have a success rate in the range of 1-5 per cent. Inbound customer-generated calls have a higher rate of success, which can range from 10-25 per cent, depending on the product. Service calls like those made to the help desk of a printer manufacturer, are more about being able to solve the customer problem. Yet even in this case, good agents are capable of cross-selling. So when you call up to ask why your printer takes too long to start, a good agent may sell you printer cartridges, or a dust cover for your new printer, or an annual maintenance contract.

At the end of the day, some agents are more persuasive than other agents. So call centres would love to learn what works and what doesn’t, and train their entire agent population regarding the good traits.

Using an association mining system, a call centre noticed that smart agents would quote the rate and immediately divert the customer’s attention from the rate by talking about something else. So while a typical agent would say, "Ma'am, the blue cartridge costs Rs 250," and then pause for the customer’s response, a smart agent would immediately add without a pause, "We have been getting a lot of requests for these, lately." Thus, the focus is now not the price, but something else. The association between uttering a phrase soon after quoting the price and positive outcomes to calls was made by this association mining system.

Similarly, an association mining system going through airline booking calls found that people buying air tickets to Goa also made hotel bookings, but people going to Jammu weren’t keen on booking a hotel room for their stay. This way, the call centre could determine which customers to target with cross-selling offers. While such insights may seem obvious in hindsight, call centre managers do not know about them until an association mining system points it out. At any given time, about 50 per cent of the agent population on the floor comprises new agents --- so there are many who do not have sufficient experience to see even the obvious associations.

Information retrieval

Let’s assume you call up because your printer is not working. The agent has to first understand the problem, and then suggest a solution. To do this, the agent needs access to relevant printer-related documentation. Today, for most issues, we Google our queries and get answers - but when the customer is waiting on the line, the agent needs to provide answers quickly, and a Google-like interface won’t work. Agents do not know all the answers, and usually have to find them from the set of internal documents that they have at their disposal. To be able to efficiently query and get the answers, call centres are building special information retrieval systems into which agents can type in questions. Within a few milliseconds, answers are provided in the form of the most relevant paragraphs and phrases from, say, the printer trouble-shooting manual, and from past cases. Agents may not know all the answers, but given these tools, they can understand the customer’s problem better and look up the answer quickly. Information retrieval tools help in doing this efficiently.

AI for training, evaluation and retraining

The cost of training a fresh candidate is about Rs 50,000. Once candidates are hired, they undergo about three to four weeks of training before going on the floor as full fledged agents. During this training phase, stress is laid on imparting:
• Language skills, such as proper pronunciation, grammar and fluency
• Soft skills like telephone etiquette, and
• Domain skills for the process that agents will be working on. For example, an agent who will be at a banking loan desk is imparted domain knowledge on loans, interest rates, terms for disbursement, etc.

Usually all the fresh candidates are imparted group training based on a generic agent training manual. But to cut costs and make the training effective, call centres are realising that in addition to the group training, individual shortcomings need to be identified, and the training should be tailored to the needs of each candidate. The same technology that is used in the hiring can be used to find shortcomings in the fluency, grammar and pronunciation of agents. They may need help with specific issues that this tool can identify. The natural language technology can also be used to find out if the agent is using phrases correctly. There is even emotion detection software available that can identify unacceptable voice tones like those that reveal anger. Call centres are continually looking at cutting training costs and making the training process effective.

Private information masking

Have you ever wondered whether the private information you provided during the call is getting stored somewhere, and whether some unscrupulous agent can misuse that? Well, it is getting stored, and call centres will soon install software that will automatically scan the calls and mask out mentions of sensitive information like credit card details, dates of birth, addresses, etc. Today, speech recognition and entity recognition systems are advanced enough to do this with reasonable accuracy. Audio signals from the recorded calls are first converted into text using speech recognition, and then entity recognition software finds the location of all the private information in the text. These portions of the audio are masked out, and the audio stored back. In fact, this facility may soon be required by government law --- implementing it is on top of the to-do list for call centres. Sometimes, to keep their call handling time low, agents do not give out mandatory information. So even though agents selling mutual funds must alert you about the risk factors, for various reasons they may not. If an agent continuously ignores giving out mandatory information to customers, then the call centre becomes liable. It is not possible to listen in on every call to monitor this. The same masking technology can be used to detect such issues.

Customer feedback

Call centres take the feedback form you filled very seriously. In fact, many businesses use this to figure out whether the call centre that they outsourced their tasks to is doing its job properly. Typical call centres send out feedback forms to a small fraction of their customers. A fraction of them reply. But since the overall numbers are huge, even this fraction of a fraction is a large number. Call centres create customer issue categories, and categorise the feedback forms into these categories. This way, the call centre may come to know that customers in March complained about slow response time, but in May they complained about bills not arriving in time. Again, many call centres are resorting to natural language processing systems that automatically categorise the feedback into one of the many pre-defined categories.

Automated call routing

Research shows that customers don’t like interactive voice response (IVR) systems. When a computer at the other end asks you to press '1' for A and '2' for B, most customers just press '9' to talk to a customer service representative. Systems are now being developed to just ask, "How may I help you?" and then automatically route your call to the correct department or agent, based on your natural language response. A speech recogniser combined with natural language processing technology understands what you are saying, and takes the step of connecting you with the appropriate department.

A lot of the technology being used in call centres will remain invisible to users. As a customer, you will only experience a better quality of service, faster response times and enhanced user experience. Many of these innovations are expected to come out of India --- after all, India is the call centre and IT capital of the world!

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Advertisers to Vie for that Two Square Inch Space on Your Mobile Handset

2008-02-25T12:20:00.007+05:30

This article first appeared Online at exchange4media on Sept 9, 2007.

The mobile advertising space has seen a lot of activity in the recent past and this space is likely to hot up in the near future. As of March 2007, there were 165 million mobile phone users in India. The worldwide numbers stood at close to 2.2 billion mobile phone users. In India, the current yearly ad spends on mobile phones stand at just $5 million, while worldwide it is $1.2 billion. But this is a segment where the ad spend growth rates are expected to be in excess of 500 pr cent a year!

So far the bulk of the ad spends have been in outbound telesales calls and the pushing of SMS and MMS ads to users. But research indicates that there is a lot of resistance to such advertising from consumers and in some countries like India the judiciary has stepped in to ban such ads as they are perceived to be intrusive.

On the other hand, advertisers perceive the handset as a very intimate way of making contact with consumers and are looking at ways to penetrate this medium. A recent survey found that young Britons would rather give up sex than live without their mobile phones. Whether this is true in India or not, advertisers know the mobile phone is always with the consumer and that it is the best way to reach out to her. There is realisation that with so much clutter in other mediums like TV, newspapers, etc., the mobile phone offers an intimate, no-clutter, mass medium for advertisers. In India, the number of mobile sets is much, much larger than the number of television sets, which stands at 80 million today. By the year-end the total number of mobile connections is likely to cross 200 million, which is larger than the total readership of the print media.

So, how are the advertisers trying to exploit this medium and reach out to consumers? First, what is it that consumers want? Research shows that consumers generally accept advertisements on their mobile phone in return for ‘free’ media and applications on their handsets. So far the mobile handset has predominantly been used only for talking and sending SMS. Now that is changing with a lot of multimedia rich phones available at a reasonable price in the market. Users now also want information, applications and rich media on their phones. A lot of players are realising this need and stepping in to provide this to the consumers.

Currently, there is not much information one can get on the mobile phone. Browsing on the small mobile screen is such a hassle. New ways of providing useful information on the mobile phone are needed. One of those stepping in to fill this void is Google, which wants to provide its famous search engine, email and interactive maps loaded on the phone to tap this medium for ads. Its CEO, Eric Schmidt, believes that mobile phone adverts are “twice as profitable or more than non-mobile phone ads because they are more personal”. Scott Berg, the Worldwide Media Director of Hewlett Packard, believes search term based advertising is the way forward as it allows the consumers to opt for rather than be pushed with irrelevant ads. Just like on the Internet, search term based advertising can be big on the mobile phone if effective ways of presenting useful information on the small mobile screen are found.

The premise of application providers is that users will get cool and useful applications for free on their handsets, which will be paid for by advertising. This suits both the consumer and the advertiser. CellSerf.com has developed the next generation messaging service that elevates the user experience beyond text to take full advantage of the mobile phones multimedia capability. CellSerf is a Value Added Service offering voice, video, picture and text SMS and voice and video email and instant messaging to the users for free. CellSerf.com partners with media companies to deliver ads to CellSerf messaging service users.

Rich media content is one space that has attracted the maximum players so far. STAR Plus Mobile, Indiatimes, Airtel Live, and many other sites offer movie clippings, mobisodes, wallpapers, ringtones, games, etc. The content at these sites is either charged per download or if it is free then it comes along with advertising. ZestADZ from mobile-worx, for example, embeds ads within WAP pages, mobile applications, mobile games, mobile content decks and SMS messages. UK-based Affle sends ads along with SMS messages by using part of the screen for advertising. This way the consumer does not view the ad as an intrusion but instead finds them useful as they are personalised based on the consumer’s interests. The personalisation is based on natural language processing of the content of the messages exchanged by the consumer.

Only certain types of mobile content are going to attract consumers and whatever attracts the consumers is in turn going to attract advertisers. Advertisers are waiting for applications which will turn the mobile phone into a utility for the consumers. When this happens – likely to be very soon – the consumer will benefit from the useful applications and the advertisers will benefit by finally being able to target the consumer in a positive way on something as personal as her mobile phone.

Weblogs and Wisdom of the Crowds

2008-01-31T23:46:00.021+05:30

This article first appeared in the January 2008 issue of i.t. magazine

How has an Internet - enabled social interaction like blogging, achieved such stratospheric heights in such a short span of time? A look at what drives bloggers and readers to keep coming back for more.

Most people today know what a weblog is, but they may not know that the term weblogs or blogs was coined only in 1999. For a word that's been in use less than ten years though, it is in everyone's vocabulary today - and writing blogs is a common activity on the internet. People want to write about themselves and everyday things and want to be read by their friends, family and even strangers. Social Networking has turned out to be one of the most popular applications of the Internet today. Some even fear that there are more blog writers than there are blog readers!

Growth of weblogs

Recently a survey in the blogosphere to find the earliest Indian blog, unearthed the article Biwi No. 1 on www.manfrommatunga.com posted on June 08, 1999 as the first Indian blog (if you know of anything earlier please do let us know). By the latest estimates there are a couple of million Indian bloggers out there.

I blog because….

Of course, there are as many reasons for blogging as there are bloggers: “I blog to externalize my internal dialogue”; “I blog because I care about the world”; “I blog because the right word has to go out”; “I blog because I love it”; “It is fun,”... But most bloggers will agree that going online to blog is driven by the urge to be heard. Every blogger wants an audience. Most bloggers on the internet seem to be driven by all or one of three unexpressed motives – attention, fame and money.

Expanding the blogosphere

Blogging today is not just about writing a diary online. There are many ways of expressing oneself online including community memberships, wikis, videos, pictures, etc. Millions of people today have a public profile on Orkut, Facebook, iLand, BigAdda, YouTube, Flickr, etc, where they put up personal details to share with the whole world. The wide usage of mobile phones with camera, video capture facilities and internet access means that anyone can capture events as they happen, and share them with the whole world. Where else can we find pictures of our favourite movie stars getting cozy in private, or our not-so-favourite politicians getting nasty in public. The blogosphere is the place to find everyday expressions of the common man. You can find things in the blogosphere that you can never find in, say, the mainstream national newspapers. Even TV channels today have strong citizen journalist sections, where they show news footage from those corners where their reporters cannot reach, but you and I can.

Monkeys on typewriters

The infinite monkey theorem says that if you give a million monkeys typewriters and infinite time, the probability that they can come up with Shakespeare’s 'Romeo and Juliet' is close to zero. But what can you expect if you give a million people computers and internet connections? Wikipedia is one such result! And who can dispute its value? Anybody can add to Wikipedia or edit the entries resulting in new information getting added all the time.

Every year, the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) holds a question answering competition, where it releases data and a set of questions. Top university and industry teams in the world compete to build automated question answering systems. In recent TREC competitions, including 2007, it was noticed that many of the top teams actually went to Wikipedia and other such common repositories of information to verify their answers. While the same answers could be found in many disparate documents spread over the internet, Wikipedia offers a single location for collected knowledge on diverse topics. This emphasizes the fact that the collective wisdom of the people has triumphed in creating this encyclopedic source of knowledge.

Collective wisdom: 1 + 1 = 11

So is everybody going online and expressing themselves there adding to the knowledge of the world? The web is a very democratic medium. Anybody can start writing and you can access what everyone else has written out there. Today there are technology blogs, blogs on eating out, blogs about movies, blogs about everything and nothing. Every thought of every individual is captured. So: name it, and it is probably out there, expressed in multiple different ways.

An internet survey in January 2003 found 64% of the respondents say that they find interesting ideas and information in weblogs that is hard to find in other media. Over 60% of the respondents also said that through blogs, they connected with people with similar professional interests, whom they could not reach through any other means. About 50% said that weblogging helped them to fruitfully exchange ideas with other people. In 2007, collaboration, sharing and collective thinking is even bigger. Today, the list of top ten most-visited sites worldwide is filled with social networking and collaboration sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Hi5 and Orkut.

So the individual jottings have become collective wisdom - Wikipedia is a case in point. Everyone adds their words to it and today it is an authoritative encyclopedia that is ever evolving. It has over 9 million articles in 252 languages! Another example is the recent censorship in Pakistan, where blog sites were blocked by the Pakistan government. Still, for anyone interested in the happenings there, the blogosphere was the place to find any and all information.

Mining wisdom

With so much out there, how do you get to the specific nuggets of wisdom that you are looking for? Other than the common keyword-based search the blogging world is evolving its own techniques. Authors of the content themselves assign tags to their posts. Also, social tagging sites like del.icio.us allow the consumers of content to categorize it. Thus, over time, a common vocabulary evolves, which is used by the creators and consumers of the content to categorize it; this vocabulary is called the folksonomy.

The blogging world is about relationships and trust. Most bloggers do not advertise themselves - over time, readers come to trust the writings of some blog writers, and recommend them to their friends. Most blog pages have repeat visitors. This also means that communities of like minded people get formed. Today, many organizations are looking for ways to catalyze online communities that they can target with specialized content, specific information and focused marketing schemes. For the members of such communities, it is a way to reach out to like-minded people, network with friends, and make themselves visible. Facebook, for example, is trying to use this concept to serve relevant advertisements to its users.

The blogosphere is collecting the thoughts of the mankind. Automatic question-answering systems, like the ones at TREC, and people like you and I, are all tuning in to this source for our nuggets of wisdom.

(Part of the monthly Folk Technology Series that I write for i.t. magazine)

Folk Technology

2008-01-31T23:38:00.004+05:30

From January 2008 I am writing a monthly series on Folk Technology in i.t. magazine. I am excited to be able to reach out to a wide audience with my writings. Every month I hope to cover a technology that is impacting people's lives.

Noisy Text Analytics

2007-01-26T23:01:00.002+05:30

Recently I co organized the workshop on analytics for noisy unstructured text data and have been excited by this topic.

Noisy unstructured text data is found in informal settings such as online chat, SMS, emails, message boards, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and web pages. Also, text produced by processing spontaneous speech, printed text, handwritten text contains processing noise. Text produced under such circumstances is typically highly noisy containing spelling errors, abbreviations, non-standard words, false starts, repetitions, missing punctuations, missing case information, pause filling words such as “um” and “uh.” Such text can be seen in large amounts in contact centers, on-line chat rooms, OCRed text documents, SMS corpus etc.

There is a lot of such text being produced. In fact, my guess is that more than 70% all text produced is noisy.

At the workshop a lot of techniques to handle noisy text were presented. There was work on correcting the noisy text and also on extracting useful information from it.

But what exactly is noisy text? There are a lot of qualitative answers to this question some of which have been mentioned in the second paragraph above. But do we have a more quantitave modelling for noise in text? Can noisy text be modelled as the traditional communications problem? A signal is sent at the transmitter and the channel corrupts it and a noisy version is received at the receiver.

Do You Have the Information to Answer My Question?

2006-03-29T15:38:00.001+05:30

Information in a computer is held in sequence of bits (zeros and ones). For example my computer has a 40 GB hard-disk and say I am using 30GB. But the true information I may be storing could be lesser because I can compress the data using a compression scheme like winzip and possibly reduce the amount of information on my computer by half. So then should I say that I have 15 GB of information on my computer? Well maybe I have duplicate copies of certain directories so deleting these further reduces the amount of stored information to 12 GB.

The concept of information content was introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948. Shannon talked about information in the sense of surprise - if you are told that event "A" happened, then how much information are you getting by knowing it. If you expected that "A" will happen then knowing that "A" has occured has not given you much information.

But can we view information content in a question answering sense. Let us look at the search engine setting. Given a query, we need to find matching documents. Let us say I type a query "centimeters meter." The result is a bunch of documents that contain these two keywords.

Let us say I asked a question "How many centimeters make a meter?" and gave you the following document to get the answer from "How to make ice-cream at home." The given document most probably has zero information with respect to asked the question. But let us say I gave you a document containing the words centimeters and meter say from the search on google mentioned above. Obviously, there is a higher probability that I could get the answer to my question from this document. So while the first document is unlikely to have any information in it to answer the question asked, the second document probably has some information? The whole premise of a search engine is built on the fact that given a question (or more simply a group of key words) the search can return documents that with high probability contain the answers to the question.

How can we measure this information content of a document with regards to the question that has been asked (query)? Can we get a measure of information in the context of question answering?

When Will Machines Chat?

2006-03-29T15:04:00.002+05:30

Could you be chatting on your computer with a machine and be fooled into thinking that you are chatting with another human being? In 1950 Alan Turing had predicted that by 2000 there will be machines that would routinely be able to fool an average interrogator into thinking it is human. This is the year 2006 and we are still far from it!!

In 1950 Alan Turing described a test for computers which has since formed the foundation of the philosophy of artificial intelligence. The test called the Turing Test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversations. A human interrogator holds a text based natural language conversation separately with a human and a machine, where both the human and the machine try to appear human. If at the end of the conversation the interrogator is unable to reliably decide which is the human and which is the machine then the machine has passed the test. Turing said that a computer that is able to pass this test has to be considered intelligent.

An intelligent machine will pass the Turing test. But there haven't been any machines made so far that can pass the Turing test. For all the advances we have made in computing in terms of speed and skill we have still not made a computer program that can pass the Turing test. There is even an annual competition, the Loebner prize for the machine that can pass the Turing Test. The winner will get the Loebner Prize Gold Medal and net a cool $100, 000 as prize money. The 2005 Loebner bronze medal and $ 2000 prize money, given to the most human machine every year, went to the jabberwacky.com program. Try this program and within a few questions you can make out it is a bot you are talking to. You realize that even your young daughter could do better. A human stores enormous amounts of information in the brain and is able to access this information within split seconds.

The interrogator is free to follow any line of questioning, in any domain. That has precisely been the problem. Machines do not have world knowledge. It is easier to impart domain specific knowledge. But an average human can converse on thousands of topics and even on entirely new topics by relating them to known settings. Humans can switch between contexts with ease and follow several different threads in a conversation. For example the interrogator can ask: "Do you own a train by any chance?" Following this the interrogator can carry on a conversation about train schedules, or railway tracks, or how it feels to have the wind blowing on ones face while travelling in a train, or the pantry food, or even the financial viability of owning a train. This is something a human handles very easily and is precisely something a machine finds very hard to handle.

With the advent of world wide web (www) information is now within the grasp of the computer. Anyone who has used google knows that there is a lot of information on the www pertaining to almost any topic. There are more than 8 billion pages that google currently indexes on the www and that number is growing everyday. We also know from the speed with which google gets the results to any query that today’s computers are capable of accessing the information on the www within split seconds. In fact there are search engines specifically designed for question answering (like ask.com).

The information is definitely out there and it is probably not the information that is the bottle neck. Lets say the question "Monika when will Rajdhani arrive in Delhi," is asked of you. You have no clue as to when it will arrive, but would still give an intelligent answer, "I dont know." If the interrogator persists, "come on give me an idea." You may say, "Which Rajdhani are you talking about? The Chennai one?" When the question about Rajdhani arriving in Delhi is popped, we quickly bring all the related things to our mind - train schedules, different Rajdhanis, our own train journey sometime in the past. Now if you did a google search on Rajdhani, you would find a lot of information about Rajdhani train schedules, different Rajdhanis to and from Delhi, people’s experiences about train travel etc. A human is quickly able to choose from all the information available to her in her head and hold useful, funny, meaningful, flippant conversations with others. And this is exactly what we expect a machine to do. The machine should have a personality, it should ask questions and initiate new conversations, show interest in the person it is talking to, have some world knowledge about recent happenings (gossip, movies, politics) and be able to converse in natural language.

The www is a recent development. Information on the www is available to a computer program. There's lots and lots of it too on different aspects from object descriptions to peoples feelings about these objects to spiritual matters to just about anything. The information on www is something that earlier machines didnt have the luxury of. Can a machine use all this information. Can it learn from it? Can it learn what is important in a given context and what is not? The information is out there but how does one harness it? It is the learning component that is missing and which we now need to concentrate on to make our computer programs pass the Turing Test. The machine that has been imparted knowledge on how to learn from the vast information out there would most probably get there first.

Useful Links:

The Turing Test Page

The Loebner Prize Homepage

Rollo Carpenter's Jabberwacky bot